catharsis development session 2: character design boot camp

for the first development stream of the month, i tried to start addressing issues with felix's design, which, if you'd like more context, and didn't catch it, you can find here.
this is follow-up on that session that i did privately... even though i've done a lot of streams, the anxiety can really get to me sometimes still.

anyway... i wrote most of the text on the images themselves.
i tried to break this one up into smaller images even though i gave myself a big canvas to ease the anxiety of running out of room. zooming in on patreon is really annoying and i prefer to just hit the horizontal arrows to navigate myself.

i'm not completely sold on felix's design yet, but i consider it much, MUCH better now. i could take any of those head designs near the end and run with it confidently.
i'm not sure if i'm really getting across WHY i'm making some of these choices, but if there's no other way to explain, it's just hours and hours of frustration that i remember about previous drawings that, by now, come to me as foresight.
i did my best to try not to leave it at "that looks weird" and instead type more precise reasoning. sometimes it makes me really anxious to see an artist go to town on their art about a bunch of things that don't seem like flaws and the reason they're bad is just some ambiguous "because it looks bad."
most of my issues with a design tend to be inflexibility and confusion.
"cluttered" can mean things are going to run into each other when the character moves, or it can mean i think it has too much detail in a way that distracts from the main focus AND will end up wasting a lot of my time by the 100th time i have to draw and shade it.
besides immediate functional issues like "the eyebrows won't have room to move, but i want them to have room to move because they're important for reading emotions" the other big thing tends to focus on cohesion, where elements of a design don't fight for attention, but there's still a good amount of peripheral detail that's not making the focus SCREAM for your attention immediately. it feels visually "full" and natural. this one i struggle to word adequately because it's more abstract and just assumptions i make about the viewing experience.

other things i didn't mention in the text because it was kind of just an internal decision i'd already made is that i extended felix's hairline to have some kinds of sideburns, which help frame the face and solidify the hairline's heart shape for me.
i also got rid of felix's nose bridge entirely. the flat face is easier for me to construct and i wasn't willing to change all of the other parts of felix's face to accommodate that nose.

anyway, i still have felix's body to contend with, but i will just say my personal opinion is that a comic character's face is the most important part of their design. most of the time when you're drawing them it won't be full body, god willing.