1863-project-art:OC-tober: Day 30What’s Next: Thirty Years’ WarThis isn’t even close to being a thin

1863-project-art:OC-tober: Day 30What’s Next: Thirty Years’ WarThis isn’t even close to being a thing yet. It’s a very loose idea. But I wanted to post these sketches to show how I start developing characters from my doodles and how they eventually begin to take shape.I had an idea a few weeks ago about doing something set during the Thirty Years’ War since the conflict doesn’t exactly get acknowledged very often even though it caused destruction on a massive scale. I’ve also never written for protagonists who despise each other, and that got me thinking about forcing a Catholic and a Protestant (likely Lutheran or Calvinist) to work together to survive during the period despite the fact that they didn’t get along, like, at all. That’s why there’s some angry face practice in here - they’re bickering about religion, most likely. I had to find ways to code the protagonists, and since I’m also working on an English Civil War thing (The World Turned Upside Down), I realized I could use the hairstyles to convey a point - Sigismund, the Catholic, has longer hair, whilst Ernst, the Protestant, has a shorter cut. I did this to play into the conception that Protestants were more stuffy due to not liking Catholic festival days and other holiday celebrations, but the fact is that Protestantism splintered into so many different varieties that it’s not really an apt statement to make (again, see the Interregnum in the UK, because holy crap). But if you go into the story not knowing the details of the Reformation and how many different flavors (so to speak) of Protestantism happened, you’ll likely figure out by looking at these two which of them is which. In addition, Sigismund’s color scheme reflects that of the Holy Roman Empire (yellow, red, and black), and Ernst has some faint oranges in his clothing even though orange wouldn’t be associated with Protestantism until the Glorious Revolution in the 1680s and later with Catholic-Protestant relations in Ireland. Again, it’s just subtle coding to let people know who’s who, which is a part of character design that I don’t think gets talked about very much.I really don’t know much else about this so far except that there’s a lot of events during the war that I’d love to incorporate into the storyline, which is also difficult to work on in the first place because I could quite literally have these characters forced to work together for almost 30 years. This does, however, mean they could develop a grudging respect, and that could even become a friendship or one of those good ol’ enemies to lovers, slow burn stories that fanfiction authors are so fond of writing… -- source link

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