At the very beginning, I used dots, which are often used in manga, to represent darker areas, I found that this was fine as concept art, but on the same black and white background this didn’t allow the characters to stand out, so I turned the dots into solid colours.
At first, the character’s bangs were featureless and too plain (the images above), but as a protagonist, she still needed something recognisable, so I added a small amount of hair as the special feature to the concept art later on to be one of her features (the following images).
As a character based on me, and with the costume already established as a school uniform, the process of creating this female protagonist was not difficult. I had long hair in high school, but the school rule said that hair longer than shoulder length had to be tied up, however, I didn’t like that rule, so I left my hair loose most of the time against the rules (I am quite a rebellious student through my school life in my point of view). Then again, the character needs to be trapped in the rules and to show how repressed she is, therefore, I set her up with short hair, which used to be long hair but was cut short to go to school.
Although I didn’t create a lot of drawings of the main character, most of the time she has an unhappy expression, only the one holding the cat is smiling.
Name, Identity Number:
Name
I purposely made the character’s name gibberish, because in many high schools in China, your name isn’t the most important thing, your school number is. As my friend said, her school number is what gives her her name, and when you go to the cafeteria you have to be sorted by your school number, and you can only go to dinner when it’s your number’s turn.
Identity Number
I didn’t use my school number a lot in my high school, so I referenced my friend in creating this one.
19 means the year of enrollment, 09 means your class, and 26 means your serial number in the class.
I went to an international high school, so it was a little different from my friend’s regular Chinese high school. I enrolled in ‘18, and my programme (a study abroad programme aimed at Canada, although I ended up in the UK, so I’ll leave out the stories in between) only had one class that went from 11 students at the beginning to 6 by the time I graduated. So I made some changes to the number, I changed the serial number that represents the class to 09 because it makes the number look like a date, and 26 is the ending number of my high school number. Which can be seen in the following image.
Reference:
Well, I didn’t save any pictures of me in high school, but to be honest, I have no pictures of me in high school, and even if I did I seem to have deleted them. These are photos I collected from my high school’s official website, and as you can see most of the girls have their hair tied up and the rest have short hair. Thanks to these seniors or juniors for contributing to my work.
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