Let's take a look at Akello's Face Dev

So today's post (which I was going to push on Saturday but had some social stuff come up oops) is going to cover the design process Atlas and I went through in trying to nail down what features would really bring Akello to life.

So, starting with my notes, I knew right away I wanted a face that was strong and a little on the wide side, to fit with Akello's large build and physical presence.  Usually my first goal at this point is to find celebrity proxies- not a face claim, per se, but someone who has interesting features and many photographs to show different looks and angles.  When designing Akello, one of the faces I kept going back to was Winston Duke's.  You can see in my notes that I really liked that he was SO handsome but also looked older and amiable.  Atlas and I both really wanted a strong jaw with a large nose paired with warm/friendly eyes and nice lips really from day 1.

We also talked about several fictional inspirations like Mat Dream Daddy and Barret Wallace, both very handsome black men with soft streaks and a tenderness that I wanted to be apparent in Akello's physical design.

Also, Atlas really sold me on dreadlock styles early into TCMs development.  I think I was still working on Mori's Gamejam version when the idea for Akello started to take shape and dreadlocks were a part of that almost immediately.  We scoured the internet and amassed FAR too many photos of very handsome men with very cool hair to be perfectly honest.

Atlas tackled face structure first and came up with this array of various builds and god the choice to narrow it down was SO difficult.

For me, each face really had very strong points so it was a difficult decision.  I liked 2 and 4 the best because in the end I felt like they conveyed Akello's very caring and warm nature, especially in the cheekbones and eye shape.  The lips on 4 were an instant winner for me, the cleft is super sexy and i'm a sucker for lip scars.  Atlas then kind of refined the design between 2 and 4 and this is how we came up with his prototype facial structure.

With Akello's hair one of the things we wanted to avoid was keeping the same general "shape" as either Mori or Amir.  Ideally, I'd like each TCM character to have their own style and identity but past that I want their silhouettes to be unique too.  Atlas helped me again with a small array of ideas for how we could go about this and again it was a SUPER hard choice to make.

Again, making the choice here was REALLY hard.  In the end we sort of combined elements from several of these to make a kind of mid point.  At this point we were also playing with piercings because I did want some on him but it turned out to be kind of a delicate balance to preserve his slightly older feel against, say, Mori.

So for today, this is the fully approved akello face.  Granted, there will certainly be little tweaks to hair and beard styles but this is VERY VERY close to where we both wanted him and to be honest, even this early into his chapter dev, I am already in love with his looks.