Behind the Comics: Character Drawing Guide 1

So here we are, celebrating 200 comics here on the blog! If there were an allocated budget, we'd probably have a couple of party balloons and a modest pavlova here for us to share (Note: if you haven't tasted pavlova, let alone know what it is, you truly are missing out on some sweet sugary goodness).
However! Even in the absence of such luxuries, I have something that might be of more interest to you: A how-to-draw guide to a few of the characters we've seen since the first blog post back in February 2016.

Dante Denmore

When I first started drawing Dante, the intention was that he was supposed to be a snake, and even had fangs in the now-non-existent concept art. But people have told me previously that Dante looks more like a sock puppet than anything else, so now I don't know what Dante is supposed to be anymore.
Much to my surprise initially, Dante has an uncanny resemblance to the characters by florkofcows or even Big Nose from the Pink Panther animated series, as seen below:

Piggo Porker

Piggo was originally based on a particular pig plush toy I happened to obtain from another time and place. Perhaps the trickiest part for someone drawing Piggo is the tail - draw it too long with too many loops and it looks like a cable, draw it too short and... I guess you could get away with that, but I always prefer to draw Piggo's tail with two loops.

Donald Aite

He was supposed to be a dog, but then morphed into a dragon of sorts, probably because Donald is missing all the hallmark features of a dog-like appearance. Drawing Donald might take a few tries, since you effectively have to draw his entire body in one long stroke. At least that's how I always do it.

Computer

Whenever I don't know how to draw something or need to represent an abstract entity, I usually just draw a box with a word written on it. You could say it's a cop-out on improving one's artistic skills, but here you are reading about how to draw a rectangle and writing a word in it.

Barry Ciders

It's basically Dante but has black hair covering his eyes. Despite Dante and Barry being visually similar in this regard, I don't think there's been any confirmation that they are relatives or anything like that.
In regards to body colour, I was going to make Barry have a dark blue shade, similar to Deino from the Pokémon series. But then it didn't look that great, so I've just been drawing him like so ever since.


As you may have already noticed, I've omitted various characters such as Douglas and Goodman, but I guess I'll save those for the next milestone blog post.
And so after 200 comics, I'm not sure how many more I can punch out until the creative juices run out. But we're both in this ride together to find out.