A lot of artists on LV have OCs whether they are OCs for series and games that exist or completely made up characters! How do you guys go about coming up with ideas for your OCs? Do you take a lot of time planning them or do they just turn into an OC by accident? Mine are a variation of both! Take Beetle for example, she was a complete accident! I just ended up drawing a random creature and Beetle was born.
Both Illuminyati and Doodlebop, as her name would suggest, are born from phone doodles. Phone doodles are doodles that I do whilst on the phone at work. I doodle shapes and lines and sometimes things come out of them! But my human characters I took time designing them to match their world and storylines. Some have even gone through a couple of re-designs! They're several years existing now so when I first made them they were to fill trope roles in the story but over the years they've fleshed themselves out quite a bit beyond just the trope I needed them to fill.
I've been RPing for about 5-6 years now, and every time I join a new one, I'll usually create a new character or two. I very rarely use the same character more than once, so at this point I've got too many to count. Usually I just create something that fits with whatever RP I'm joining.
I only really have one OC that ain’t a Pokémon (though, the only real Pokémon I have is Bigjaw). Bronze was just literally my body type as a 15 year old. And then I put him in a cowboy hat and a leather jacket. He also has very exaggerated traits of me. Like, how I can be aggressive and use fists. Bronze would beat the ever living crap out of something. He also has a hat obsession that’s not too far from my own :/
How I plan and make OCs is pretty random really, I cant' even properly explain what I really do. I do spend a decent amount of time making them once I get rolling and usually continue to build on them over the years.
My character came from a Minecraff skin I made a long time ago. Choco and I have also come up with other characters. They are split up into different groups in this universe, and each group has a distinct personality, so we built on that. As for the appearance, we used a bit of their backstory and personality.
OC's for my accounts I just pull from my fanfictions. I don't roll play as those characters, I'm just lazy and don't want to come up with an OC specifically for my account. Even my name was pulled from an OC to a fanfiction that never got off the ground. How I build my OC's for my fanfictions is a far longer story and differs wildly from each other.
Most Of My OCs Are Inspired Based Like Geroniny Is Inspired By Geronimo While My Currently Two New OCs, Casslina And Airglow Are Inspired By The Peoples Who Work On Cassini Mission And Cassini Spacecraft Individually. (Edit-30th Sept 2018: I Need Help On Changing My Pokémon Oc And In Both Naming And Designing Of The Pokémon Oc! The Thread About It: https://lakevalor.net/threads/need-help-in-designing-and-naming-a-pokemon-oc.22896/)
Choco was actually created before my Minecraft skin was, but I already had a purpose and idea in mind. We have 7 characters that we share, but other than that, I've been coming up with a few of my own. I'm working on making my two new original universes, both with different characters, and I have some random characters with no universe, with my two personal characters (mostly for RP and personas) and the scrapped universe starring Claire I. Nette. (She's a joke character, planning to throw her in a universe for a character insert series.)
Fate and Will in my Fakemon series were made from scratch, though I had a rough idea of what they'd look like beforehand; just character traits here and there, maybe a few physical features I'd like to see happen. They just kinda clump together, there's not really a set process tbh XD
Some of my OC's were made with a deliberate goal in mind, mostly my human characters, others like Mare and Celosia were just done because I was doodling basically.
My first OCs were designed to create a team of Pokémon. They were simply Pokémon with personalities. I have a number of these. It was a while before I started customizing them, physically, though the changes from basic Pokémon were limited in scale. I don't like Pokémon OCs that deviate too far away from the norm, because at some point the OC stops being the Pokémon it was originally. Then came my "true" OC. This guy. Spoiler: Really Old Art (2010) Spoiler: Not So Old Art (2017) He's a Digimon, a subspecies of an existing one with unique attributes, but he is my first experience designing something remotely original. Designing human OCs has always given me trouble. From their body structure to facial features to even their names, I struggle with them. Still, I have a fair few now. I have one Pokémon trainer and a handful of Digimon characters, plus related family members and friends (or at least, ideas about them). And of course, every RP I join necessitates a new OC. Here's to the future.
Most of my OCs came from old rps, 2 came from a series of dreams I had, 1 came when I got into MHA. I usually spend a day or two getting their basic stuff (such as appearance) down and then spend a long time getting proper backstory (if I end up doing that). Shadria, my main online OC/Persona, took 7-8 years to get down completely. Then...there's one that I made as a joke, but love a lot even if I don't use him often/at all. Spoiler His name is Squishy and he's one of my other less used (but more fleshed out) OC's pet kracken. It originally came from a joke I made when I was sleepy, where I got the owner (then a young child) to bug her father for a pet (in a old rp). The father (owned by another user) actually went and got her a cuttlefish(?). The two have been inseparable since, lol.
I tend to design OCs around setting and context, especially if it’s set in a universe that isn’t my own. I always do my utmost to adhere to the universe’s rules and canon, while still trying to keep it fresh with personal twists or a bit of speculation about some vague spots in the canon. For my own worlds I’m much less formal about the creation process. Sometimes the character comes first, and then the world. I tend to play with ideas more loosely since I can always decide the rules later.
I always have trouble making my oc's different to each other cause I always want them to be like me lol. But I do try to come uo with characters with different styles and stuff. Sometimes it just comes to me and sometimes it takes me ages! It really just depends
All of my non-fandom (completely original) characters are made from scratch. I usually develop them based on the setting they are in. All of my fan-based characters are random though, and are usually 'just for fun'-type characters that went meant to be taken seriously. Most of them don't have an in depth personality or backstory.
When it comes to OCs in fanfics, I tend to draw from the already existing characters to try and make them feel more like they belong in the setting. I also tend to only use them to fill roles that wouldn't really work with a canon character. Probably the best example in my works so far would be Carmine Noir from Pokémon: Four Journeys. He's basically just an adult version of Silver because I wanted a character like Silver but as a mentor and the story is based off of Gen I, so Silver himself wouldn't work for the role. When it comes to characters in original stories, it's really more a matter of just what comes to me. For example, in my short story Trapped (link in my sig) I decided that I wanted to make a story with sort of an Indiana Jones/Tomb Raider kind of feel to it. I ended up with Kris Garner, who's basically just Lara Croft without the accent and a bit more respect for actual archeological work, and Alwin Trelser. I'm not entirely sure how to describe Alwin, but he's one of my favorite characters that I've come up with.
I was thinking about it and all my ocs have some sort of my personality in one way or another. So i guess i just take pieces of my personality and make ocs around it
