SunBearStars: What do you do with characters you don't want? →

nightingales:

sunbearstars:

mometa:

I really don’t use some of my characters anymore, and I was wondering what other people do? Do you just ignore them, do you draw them anyway, do you revamp them (I don’t think I’d do this), do you kill them off or announce them nonexistent, or something else?

Reblogging cause it…

Reblogging because 200 characters is too little to say what I wanted to say!….

I found the replies to this really interesting. I’ve never been really big on making characters that revolve around aesthetics. The initial idea might come from something specific I really like, but if it doesn’t lead to anything beyond that I can’t be bothered into investing time into drawing them. That said, characters that don’t make it beyond about a week are dropped/forgotten and I don’t feel really bad. It’s like their ideas are re-absorbed into my head and recycled in various ways (at random without prior thought). 

However! When characters have thought out stories, that I’ve put weeks and months into thinking about (numerous character sheets and plots, sub-plots, snippets), I find it amazingly hard to get rid of them when they don’t interest me anymore. I still draw them occasionally, but I must announce to people who have.. some sort of interest in them… that they are basically dead. In general it’s stories that get tossed, not so much the individual characters.

I’m not a good story teller, but I’m meticulous about details, where things HAVE to make sense, nothing can be left unturned, and I get stuck in that and stop looking at the big picture, which is why a lot of things get dropped. I still draw characters from the stories occasionally (usually for lack of a better subject). Sometimes, months or years afterwards, I’ll re-visit a plot and try to make it work again, but that is a lot harder than starting from something new.

HEY look at that, I totally sidetracked from the initial post.

(Source: nolongermometa)