Pride Month Profile: Chey
For our second Pride Month Profile, we're taking a look at one Ms. Cheyenne Livingston.
So, Chey. She's technically the character who's been on the project the second-longest, right from the very beginning pretty much. Though she's easily gone through the most changes. Even just in her relationship with Caleb, she's gone from a romantic interest (ugh) to the third wheel (srsly, ugh ugh) to the platonic best friend, and finally settled on the lesbian buddy who's kept him out of trouble since young times. They'd have come into the Disciples together as the fledglings, apprentices (the Disciples disciples, even?)
But one of the more visible differences is that she used to look like this.
Somewhere along the way, I'd realized I'd stopped caring about Fiona, and the story didn't have anything to address that. So I ended up restructuring some events and creating new ones to give her an actual role. She now leads the campaign against Dionysus with Carlisea and has a lot of delicious character arcs in that and throughout. To accomodate this, I ended up restructuring her a lot, too. Somewhere in there the question of why she should be white came up. By the time I had an answer, I had Chey.
I'm still not sure how to do her skin tone, but I can't help thinking it'd be weird leaving it blank. She isn't white, after all, no reason she should look white. The only problem is my tests with how to do it with pencil have been...well, I'm just really not sure about them. This'd be easier if I were still inking, since I could just pick a greytone that worked, but that isn't the case anymore.
Anyway, this is how my test turned out (along with a little guess at her hair without the bandana that might be a little off, it was dark in the room i was drawing this in)
I dunno, does that look as bad as I think it does?
Like all of the other mages in the Disciples, Chey's half of a teacher/student pair. In her case, she studies under Carlisea, learning how to channel magic through music. But Chey hits a stumbling block when a magic-induced affliction in her throat takes her voice, leaving her as a bard who can't sing. She's having to relearn from the bottom on a new instrument, her acoustic guitar.
To communicate, she has a PDA (a Blackberry prolly, i really like the keypads on those) with a text-to-speech app. In order to keep up with any given conversation, she's learned to type in a shortcutted, phonetic manner that preserves the general sound of the words, but ends up close to unreadable to anyone else. She's the only one that has to read it anyway, but I imagine she's not entirely cool with all the mistyping. I also imagine she has quite a complex autocomplete dictionary.
(i'm playing around with how her hair'd look as an actual shape rather than a mass of squiggles
also still deliberating on whether her balloons are actual transcripts of her texts, but it's fun to play in Microsoft Anna to find out what they'll be!)
In all honesty, she should more accurately be using ASL, but I hit a few roadblocks there.
~ ASL is incredibly tricky to convey in comics
~ I don't know ASL beyond the alphabet (though my mom does, and there's a vast internet to learn from)
~ In order to ensure her message got across, she'd need an interpreter at any given time
These might be bad reasons, I dunno. I don't want to make any big missteps with her muteness, so I hope this isn't problematic (and i hope anyone who thinks it is will feel free to tell me so!).
Chey got to a point where she developed what I call Schrodinger's Sexuality, which in theory describes a character with no romantic arc whatsoever, so zie might fall they will. In practice I don't actually tend to consider as many characters as I perhaps should in that category so much as the ones I'm considering making LGBTQ anyway, so I settled on her being a for-sure lesbian. I've been thinking about what kind of romantic arc to build for her to accommodate.
All of this forms a weird aggregate that makes me uneasy, though. In one character, I have a black lesbian with a disability. If she were the only woman or the only POC or the only LGBTQ character this might be a little weirder, but she is the only PWD off the top of my head. Plus the nature of her disability combined with her quadruple minority status makes her almost like some strange metaphor for a silenced minority. I don't know how I feel about that, but it's a little weird. I'm doing my best to make sure she's not solely defined by any of them, though they are aspects to her character to keep in mind. I just hope I'm not screwing it up.
Chey should make her debut in chapter six.
if that chapter ever happens D:
So, Chey. She's technically the character who's been on the project the second-longest, right from the very beginning pretty much. Though she's easily gone through the most changes. Even just in her relationship with Caleb, she's gone from a romantic interest (ugh) to the third wheel (srsly, ugh ugh) to the platonic best friend, and finally settled on the lesbian buddy who's kept him out of trouble since young times. They'd have come into the Disciples together as the fledglings, apprentices (the Disciples disciples, even?)
But one of the more visible differences is that she used to look like this.
Somewhere along the way, I'd realized I'd stopped caring about Fiona, and the story didn't have anything to address that. So I ended up restructuring some events and creating new ones to give her an actual role. She now leads the campaign against Dionysus with Carlisea and has a lot of delicious character arcs in that and throughout. To accomodate this, I ended up restructuring her a lot, too. Somewhere in there the question of why she should be white came up. By the time I had an answer, I had Chey.
I'm still not sure how to do her skin tone, but I can't help thinking it'd be weird leaving it blank. She isn't white, after all, no reason she should look white. The only problem is my tests with how to do it with pencil have been...well, I'm just really not sure about them. This'd be easier if I were still inking, since I could just pick a greytone that worked, but that isn't the case anymore.
Anyway, this is how my test turned out (along with a little guess at her hair without the bandana that might be a little off, it was dark in the room i was drawing this in)
I dunno, does that look as bad as I think it does?
Like all of the other mages in the Disciples, Chey's half of a teacher/student pair. In her case, she studies under Carlisea, learning how to channel magic through music. But Chey hits a stumbling block when a magic-induced affliction in her throat takes her voice, leaving her as a bard who can't sing. She's having to relearn from the bottom on a new instrument, her acoustic guitar.
To communicate, she has a PDA (a Blackberry prolly, i really like the keypads on those) with a text-to-speech app. In order to keep up with any given conversation, she's learned to type in a shortcutted, phonetic manner that preserves the general sound of the words, but ends up close to unreadable to anyone else. She's the only one that has to read it anyway, but I imagine she's not entirely cool with all the mistyping. I also imagine she has quite a complex autocomplete dictionary.
(i'm playing around with how her hair'd look as an actual shape rather than a mass of squiggles
also still deliberating on whether her balloons are actual transcripts of her texts, but it's fun to play in Microsoft Anna to find out what they'll be!)
In all honesty, she should more accurately be using ASL, but I hit a few roadblocks there.
~ ASL is incredibly tricky to convey in comics
~ I don't know ASL beyond the alphabet (though my mom does, and there's a vast internet to learn from)
~ In order to ensure her message got across, she'd need an interpreter at any given time
These might be bad reasons, I dunno. I don't want to make any big missteps with her muteness, so I hope this isn't problematic (and i hope anyone who thinks it is will feel free to tell me so!).
Chey got to a point where she developed what I call Schrodinger's Sexuality, which in theory describes a character with no romantic arc whatsoever, so zie might fall they will. In practice I don't actually tend to consider as many characters as I perhaps should in that category so much as the ones I'm considering making LGBTQ anyway, so I settled on her being a for-sure lesbian. I've been thinking about what kind of romantic arc to build for her to accommodate.
All of this forms a weird aggregate that makes me uneasy, though. In one character, I have a black lesbian with a disability. If she were the only woman or the only POC or the only LGBTQ character this might be a little weirder, but she is the only PWD off the top of my head. Plus the nature of her disability combined with her quadruple minority status makes her almost like some strange metaphor for a silenced minority. I don't know how I feel about that, but it's a little weird. I'm doing my best to make sure she's not solely defined by any of them, though they are aspects to her character to keep in mind. I just hope I'm not screwing it up.
Chey should make her debut in chapter six.
if that chapter ever happens D: