Everything I draw ends up wearing a bow-tie

Anonymous asked: Hi! Since your characters have the most beautiful and well-defined personalities, I wanted to ask: how do you do that? How can you create such a wonderful and astonishingly realistic thing? What's on your mind while creating and then developing new characters? P.S.: I'm sorry - I apologise for any grammatical errors... I'm Italian :)

yikes, hard question- because I’m not sure, because I let the characters do all the work for me! I guess I’ve always observed people, how they talk and act when they’re feeling certain ways, and I’ve always been very empathetic- meaning that I often don’t just correctly observe how people are feeling, but I actually end up feeling the same way as they do (which can be exhausting and I have to be careful with!). Basically I just create a thought experiment: create a scenario and put characters into it, and see how they react. I can only do this with characters I feel I understand very well, obviously, but really I just sit back and let it play out in my head and my heart. When I think I have enough of a grip on it in my mind, then I start roughing out the comic. 

Much of the framing and layout stuff has come just by doing it for a lot of years (working as a storyboarder certainly helped), so the best way to pick that stuff up is to read lots of comics, watch lots of visual media, and draw draw draw. For the acting out of personalities, I can only assume the same, but if I can’t feel or ‘naturally’ feel what a character would do in response to a situation then I have to reconsider things, or simply just wait, or backtrack- is there something else that happened before this that does not flow naturally? Is there someone else who did something that feels ‘out of character’? Is this the way this character REALLY wants to react, or have they got another angle?

In terms of creating characters with personalities, again I feel I cheat, because I usually am partly ‘approached’ by them rather than making them up from start to finish. Time’s rather abrupt and stark, panel abusing personality just appeared as a consequence of what he is and how he exists, mixed in with the behaviour of his acquaintances the Mad March Hare and the Mad Hatter. The fact that he has an Aussie accent in my head is a total surprise to me.

Uhhhh basically SIT AND THINK. THINK THINK. BUT NOT TOO HARD because the character is the one who thinks. You listen. Writing people is about listening to the people in your head. Yeah.