Revisiting Hunter and Waif

Hunter and Waif is a theme I posted on a month or two back. I've been doing a lot of character design lately for clients, but not much for myself and so I thought I might come back to H and W because I kind of like them and think they might be interesting characters to work with if I can nail them down. When I'm working up my own ideas like this I usually start to get story ideas while I'm drawing. That was the case here. They went from being interesting shapes that I wanted to experiment with, to a couple of characters with back history and motivation.

I began to imagine a story in the far north like say the Yukon or Siberia. Waif has escaped from an orphanage or perhaps she was taken by a witch from the orphanage and later escapes. In any case she is wandering alone in a winter forest world when she is found/rescued by the hunter. Now they are together and he must try to save her but his range is limited and so he will have to hand her over to the next hunter and then the next and so on and so forth until the final hunter will be able to deliver her to safety. Maybe she would rather stay with Hunter, or perhaps she would like to become a hunter herself. These are merely the opening thoughts/ideas for a possible story but I'm curious about them and so I will continue to investigate.

I was pretty happy with the design for Hunter. He is a big simple shape and doesn't say too much but I found the Waif character a little harder to simplify properly. I couldn't quite decide how I wanted her to look. Is she happy and upbeat, not yet tainted by captivity or depressed and lonely ? Is she glad that Hunter has rescued her or does she still feel like a prisoner ? I need to have answers for these questions before I can finalize her design. Still working on her, and of course the story ideas keep coming.

More soon. I know the posting has been a little sparse lately but so much of what I'm doing these days is protected by NDA's that there isn't really much left over that I can share. I still occasionally find a few minutes to get into my sketchbook, and that is what we have here this time.

Peace   :)