how would your ocs draw themselves?

Posted 5 years, 1 month ago (Edited 5 years, 1 month ago) by cosmicconundrum

this thread is sort of like a combination "what is your oc's art style" and "how does your oc see themself?"

if your character were asked to draw a self portrait, what would it look like? what features do they emphasize, and what aspects do they incorporate? what style do they draw in?

i thought this would be a cool art prompt initially and doodled my main 4 and their self portraits. it was hilarious.

for example:

  • juniper draws in a style reminiscent of 20th century cartoons. lots of soft curves, dark lines, gentle shading, smiling figures. she draws herself with wavy hair. when she fleshes out a portrait it looks like this.
  • kanen draws in a bad 80s yaoi anime style(at least that's the best way i can describe it. it's terrible, anyhow.) she always makes herself look sharper and edgier than normal.
12667401_DpQ4W3VOAjMPryG.png
  • jubilee draws very detailed, sensual portraits from the waist up. she spends a lot of time adding accenture to the eyes. heavy shading and bold strokes are common.
  • saeva draws very light, somewhat smudged fullbody portraits. usually they look like something you would see on the wall of someone's house. the technique is there but she's too hesitant to fully flesh out any portrait.
here's all of them holding their portraits!
12643165_4IRdQVtnWCZirrB.png
Cliodna

This seems fun. :D Oddly enough I don't have a lot of artistic characters but I'll give it a shot.

Both versions of Nimue Jakande would have the oddest "style" to their portraits on account of being technically blind.

As for medfant!NImue Jakande I actually have this picture from 2009, from a scene where she got a chance to try out painting for the first and only time. It wasn't supposed to be an autoportrait at the time, rather an attempt at depicting the White Walker-like baddies in her roleplay, but an actual autoportrait would've looked very similar (though possibly with no "eyes"). She'd never experienced light and shadow at that time, and only experienced color once (when encountering the aforementioned baddie). She could sense auras, but it had little to do with vision, being more akin to "feeling" or touching a person from every angle at once. Thus when she tried to draw a head she...essentially couldn't choose an angle and thus just made a vague blob, like trying to depict it from all angles at once.

Contemporary!Nimue Jakande would fare a bit better at the start of her story. Having been more familiarized with how faces are "supposed" to look from engravings and other sources she'd probably submit the most generic face imaginable when asked for an autoportrait. 

63UsJt9.png


As her powers evolved however she kinda became able to "feel" things like phone- and computer screens, so she would've been able to work on an autoportrait using her phones' screen to see how her face would look. I'd like to imagine that her "style" would completely lack linework, instead be made up of blobs of color, possibly without her quite understanding which part of her face she's currently working on. It would also escape some of the typical "newbie" mistakes because the usual visual shortcuts for how a face is "supposed" to look like haven't been programmed.

kKi2lc4.png


Parable of the Cave is another whose style would be interesting. She thinks she's The Best Artist out there, with her style being very tribal, striving to give forth the "idea" of a creature in as few lines as possible. No shading. No perspective. Just geometry or continuous lines.

LVnEVHs.pngqdn19J0.png

These are her default ways of depicting a "human". In her culture a person is not distinguished in art - rather art is there to distinguish the person (as most of the art in her clan is in the form of glowy tattoos which they use to tell one-another apart at a glance in low-light environments). Were she to start adding specifying elements, such as tattoos or facial features, it would defeat the goal of geometric simplicity. Thus this is how she would draw herself. The same as others. With the mark which means "Human". 


I didn't quite manage to capture the autoportraits of Julia/Henry however I think I created something truly terrifying in my attempt and I want to share the nightmares. :D

ugWpfgW.pngxZ74W0Y.png


S/He wouldn't pay much attention to hir actual facial features - such as the shape of hir eyes and face, downplaying the pointiness of hir nose. A lot of attention would go towards tertiary sexual characteristics, such as clothing and makeup. S/He sees hir default appearance as a base on which props are to be applied, thus the latter is more important than the underlaying skeletal structure. 

Hir actual drawing skills are better than depicted. S/He's got a good eye for detail, just no artistic education (thus falling prey to the usual visual shortcuts the brain tries to force one to take). S/He's also got a very steady hand so I feel like an actual drawing s/he makes would actually have quite the neat and confident linework.

Char aaawhyme

Char doodled this on a cave wall with a rock a while back- for an evil demon overlord, he's very sensitive of his art... DON'T JUDGE OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES.

chardoodle_by_aaawhyme-dc3jc9v.jpg

Beth shockshark

4b673c76_f73a_4632_8dfd_6f15edd37918_by_

Beth isnt really too skilled with her hands (or spelling) anymore, but she certainly tries her best!

zeta-male

HI I thought this would be fun and it REALLY WAS. I did like 7 little experiments but here's my favourites =D

tumblr_pr27ppnkcm1un91zzo2_540.pngNoah's got a great hand, but his art experience is pretty much entirely geometry - exact measurements and perfect angles make good runes! that would carry through if you asked him to do a self portrait. he only works in black pen (out of spite) so you can still see all the guidelines. the bitch wants symmetry! so then when he stops working in exact measurements, he ends up with a lot of scribbles trying to get the right line. his pages suffer a lot of drafts that have been aggressively scribbled out. he strives for accuracy so nothing is particularly downplayed or exaggerated; if he was drawing without a mirror, though, his face shape and eye shape would probably look a bit more like his Chris's, since he's always been told they look nothing alike and is mad abt it.
Noah only chills out when drawing hands; he loves hand anatomy and his pages are full of doodles of his own

tumblr_pr27ppnkcm1un91zzo1_1280.png..... Ivy......... yea.................
even if he cares about drawing well, his hands aren't in great shape for fine details, so this would probably take up more of the page than it did. ironically, he has a really good grasp of his prominent features - he knows his face is round and pointy, and he gets comments on his creepy smile and freaky eyes so those have gotta be here, and the claws are a MUST they are a PART OF HIM, he emphasize. the scars though... too hard for his dumb numb hands and also they kind of embarrass him cosnidering they're mostly his fault <:I
the slit pupils and pointy teeth are............ artistic freedom, on ivy's part, hes bitter he doesnt have any.

Christine Evelyn Anderson Cliodna

1R6eOCx.png

I got one for Christine. Ballpoint sketches in her notebook. Without and with the aid of a mirror, comments written alongside in English Shorthand. She's quite decent at making quick drawings, but due to never having studied anatomy she's not exceptionally great at depicting humans. Her strong suit is actually architecture and geometrical stuff, but it doesn't translate over to portraits at all (i.e. she doesn't use the same techniques she'd use for depicting a room for, say, constructing a face). She's got quite a good grasp on how to (slightly exaggeratedly) depict the shape of her lips though! And if left to her own imagination she'll never draw herself with glasses.

Luna Swissy

Cracks knuckles here we go bros13896875_2MhFC4L0hzuAJTj.png

Above is her self-indulgent doodle

Luna has a fairly cartoonish artstyle, even inworld, it is considered a cartoonish. Her lineart consists of dots and "unfinished lines" because most of her lines are just refinied sketch lol. Or just straight up lining. She's a fan of simplistic and softish artstyle. Though she's still learning proportions and anatomy. Her artworks' colour tends to use darkish, blue colours. Her cel shading revolves around the colour blue too. Luna also has a wide cariety of medias to draw. Such as pencils, digital tools (a laptop and a tablet), and watercolour tools (brushes, paint, watercolour paper)

She also doesn't draw mouths for some reason. "it's just a stylistic choice," Luna says

12043441_m5jATUtdJxcWAKO.png

More example

Artifex Souligni CallmeKomodo

As a human, ROFL!!! She probably has a human sona and it's probably me with really hecking green hair LOLOLOL! 

Half beardedmen

Like this! Featuring his large dragonborn friend

note.png

Owen Crimson-Catalyst

Owen's an animator & he does a lot of doodling in his spare time - he has a few OCs but is very very shy about them, so he tends to just draw things at random

his work looks somethin like this; it's shifted as ive drawn more with it lol

8553474_GxxJ8MWk1o17knV.png3644083_Yj6NJXFK4seDOhx.png?1533448784


My boy Dennis is also an artist but he's canonically a far better artist than me (his style is near-perfect realism) so uhhh no examples there lmao

H.C. Domino Domino Jr. (Dominic Terrine) spoonfayse

my character Domino has a human sona and it's. yeah. he's a fairly competent artist.

Jeffery Mendoza ★ jukeboxes

Jeffery doesn’t consider himself much of an artist, but the hobby does help him express some feelings he’s repressed regarding past events. He’s not sure if it even helps at all with the pain, but at least now it’s down on paper.

(On the left is his artwork: on the right is him as he creates it.)
15578083_ClbnmExHxNZxCHl.png