Forums » RP Discussion » What inspired your OC's design?

For Joot, his design was mainly based off of a random character from an old webcomic I forgot the name of who was a black cat with blue eyes. Then, I found a picrew that had a black cat with blue eyes and blue ears, inspiring that. His outfit was actually not my creation. Originally, he was meant to wear a pink hoodie, but the artist for his first reference gave him a bottle green one. After that, it kinda just stuck! I had also wanted to make him a witch or magic user from the beginning, and after playing Elden Ring it inspired his main spellcasting, uniform, and overall setting.

How about yours?

I've responded to this type of forum question before.
https://www.rprepository.com/community/forums/topic/85319?page=3#post-6092718

But I thought I'd respond to this one.

Dusha actually originated by me being very inspired by a character here on RPR, who I don't remember the name of at the moment, but was a child warrior as well and had a really interesting profile set-up that looked professional and like it could actually be real records and redacted info, etc.

I ended up building on the "child warrior" and "professional info look" and created Dusha. At first, I just started with the basics, name, age. Then I looked for a faceclaim.

I found an image, I don't remember where, and altered it slightly to reflect Dusha. (Brown hair, bleeding eye)

Then I started filling his character more than just basics. Giving him two bloodhounds named Whiskey and Rocks, and giving him hair color, birthdate, place of birth, height, etc. I then went into writing his backstory and his medical records. And finally, rumors, supply and basically just everything else.

As stated in the link I shared of a previous forum I replied to, I got a lot of inspiration from Mother 3, which actually just started with the pigmask references, the rumors and the eye injury, but I ended up expanding it and editing things to fit this inspiration. (Nurse Lola, mother death, other enemies, sunflower motif, etc.)

The links on Dusha's profile that reads "Treating people just like pawns in chess" is a reference to a song known as "Warpigs" by Black Sabbath, which I felt worked with the pigmask thing, since, well... Warpigs.

I am really proud of Dusha's character, despite not using him as much as I'd like to.

When I first came up with the idea for Theo, I wanted an OC in the Marvel Cinematic Universe who didn't come across as being perfect. In my mind, all the other heroes had fairly positive origin stories, so I decided to make Theo's really dark and have him suffer a lot. Making him related to Iron Man was based on the fact that I found all of the different armours the character used to be cool. I knew though, that I couldn't just pass off images of Iron Man as an OC, so I needed a design for what he looked like underneath the armour. I'm not very good at drawing, so I tend to rely on free, easy-to-use stuff to design character concepts. After trying out a somewhat anime-inspired look that I later rejected, I settled on the current design which was created in HeroForge. Theo is average height, although somewhat thin and pale due to a history of physical and mental health issues. His hair is a sort of auburn colour, similar to his mother, Pepper Potts. He's also incredibly smart and witty, like Tony Stark, although Theo comes across as less egotistical due to how subdued he can be at times. Him using a crutch/cane for mobility was inspired by the beginning of "The Dark Knight Rises", when Bruce Wayne has abandoned being Batman and is all reclusive. The justification for Theo needing a crutch is that he has nerve damage that has left him with partial paralysis. In a further Iron Man reference, he has an implanted ARC Reactor which powers his pacemaker.

Drael and Mathius come from a lore that a I and group of friends created well over a decade ago.

I got an idea for Pierre's first drawing when joking about majority of catboys and catgirls being skinny and small and comparing them to random pictures of non-skinny and not-so-small cats. Big domestic cats, or cats that looked like they were ripped

For Lumika- she's more or less a previous iteration of my first OC ever, which evolved to cat > cat girl > demon cat girl > chimera demon > more complex demon with lore. I've always liked characters with notable animal-like arms or legs, like Cheshire Cat from Pandora Hearts, and non-conventional designs for tails.

Merril is very much the result of discovering Atelier of Witch Hat's art style, and already having a love for magic and sorcerers.

While with Avery- just, Accord from Drakengard 3

Quite a few things inspired me in the way of making this funky lil' fella here. Aside from the very obvious cowboy theming, the most prominent sources of inspiration were Hellboy, Ghost Rider, and Deathwing from World of Warcraft.

My inspiration for my characters tend to be a mix from my own life experiences and the tales of heroes and larger than life figures, along with timeless stories like the Lord of the Rings, some bits of ASOIAF, Berserk, and some others.

Then I create the characters if they come to me or if a need needed to be filled. For example, there was an RP that wanted a character that could act as a guiding figure for their character. So I created my character, Oronelar, for that RP role, but I fine tuned him to be my own and pulling from examples of the stories I read. Like Oronelar's design inspiration came from Maglor, one of the sons of Fëanor, who is known for his singing ability and his kindness yet reluctance and foolish decisions regarding the Silmarils and his decision to follow through with the oath he made with his brothers and father (which caused a whole lot of tragedy for themselves and for others).

Also, because I am Catholic and my inspiration comes from Tolkien, who is himself a Catholic and inspired by Catholicism while writing the Lord of the Rings and his materials compiled for the Silmarillion (yes I know he was inspired by the Germanic tales and the Kalevala but one cannot deny his religious influences in his work), Oronelar naturally became a holy being of sorts, kind of like an angel. And I kind of like it because I like it when I tie characters to things I love and experienced.

As for their looks, I tend to follow a sort of color scheme. Like Oronelar is known for having red hair. I give him red clothes or green clothes, green clothes to complement his shades of red. The colors represent his fiery passion to defeat evil and his deep compassion for others and for life, but also it represented his pride and his depression at the deeds gone awry due to his pride and ambition, and ignoring the warning of his gods.

I think really, inspiration of design for Lizbeth is more than obvious, she’s a doe. First she was like some doe, a female deer, no matter what species.
I worked more on her and added her story, her way of life, everything simply sucked out of my thumb. I didn’t have real inspiration for her character, but I definitely used the ‘natural’ harmless aura in peoples minds of does being very kind. Thanks to Walt Disney here having accentuated this with…. Bambi. Who didn’t cry at his Mom’s death ??
Her species was almost decided naturally, as when I drew her, she got those typical markings from northern white-tailed deer. In her story she comes from far North too. In her description, Lizbeth has a photo of a real white-tailed doe, with quite obvious similarities to Lizbeth avatar