I decided it would be fun to go back and look at the evolution of original characters I’ve been using for a while, show off how their design changed and why, and just generally hear myself talk. Hopefully, you find the process interesting as well, maybe it will even help some of you in some way. For this first installment, I ran a Twitter poll and was actually sort of surprised Critical Heaven’s Tomcat beat out my de facto mascot Eishi, but there’s a lot of stuff to say about her character and design over time.
You could almost say that Tomcat’s design began with an Arwing girl I drew ages ago during my daily sketch project. Of course, she would be a fox rather than a ‘cat,’ but the brown hair and white streak were already there to mimic Fox McCloud’s hair. It’s also pretty obvious I’ve been into the “anime girls as planes” thing for a very long time at this point. The design was actually designed to work best as a chibi with her toting a rifle shaped like the Arwing’s nose so the overall shape of the ‘sprite’ would look like a chunky version of the inspiration. I’d done plenty of designs like this for kicks in the past but didn’t have much idea what to do with them until I started getting into mobile games like Girls’ Frontline and something… clicked.
Really, breaking down Tomcat will say a lot about the project overall since she was the first ‘plane girl’ I started working on. A-10 sprung to mind more or less fully formed, but Tomcat is more of a guideline for the rest of the conventional strike fighter class. The very first take on Cat was kind of a cynical “what would an Eastern-made video game do with a personification of an iconic US fighter,” so she’s a top heavy, blue-eyed blonde. Several early takes use a more drab jacket which was inspired by Tom Cruise’s Top Gun flight suit- but a flight suit isn’t really that fan servicey, so…
The twintails were actually probably about the most clever part since the F-14 *does* have two tails (thrust nozzles and rudders that is.) Her ribbons carrying Jolly Rogers was kind of intended to be a deal where if she was deco’d as other units their logo could replace it, but I went with those since they looked cool and it sort of doubles as a Macross ref. The aviators stay a constant through basically all versions.
I decided to change her to brown hair pretty early on for no particular reason other than a preference for redheads and brunettes. I wanted to give her cat ears in some form or another but shied away from giving her *actual* cat ears in favor of her headset including them. Another idea was putting small copies of the tail fins on her headset positioned like cat ears, but they don’t look much like a pair and having them sideways creating drag is basically the opposite of what they’re supposed to do. Looking back at the second draft I think I like having them smaller like this than what she currently has, especially since giving her kind of a pixie cut instead of twintails makes *anything* on her head stand out more. The armor isn’t more than hinted at but early on I was planning to have everyone wear their wings at hip level so I could do whatever when posing the upper body. The Jolly Rogers scarf is probably a little too on the nose GFL-ish but it looks cool, dammit.
As things went on, I decided on more of a “cool big sis” image for her and ditched the twintails and knotted undershirt. She looks so dependable in this stage! She also lost the Jolly Rogers imagery around here since I sort of started to get an inkling of saving some of the cooler themed paint jobs and stuff for variant costumes and the like and also wanted room to figure out an original look for the squadron. (In the end they all kind of just do their own thing, though…)
The white streak found its way into Cat’s hair at some point (I honestly forgot it left other than her blonde phase!) I think it helps a bit to make her look more like an alley cat if her ‘coat’ isn’t all one color. I also made her a little younger looking since the fighter line she and her team are inspired by are collectively known as the “Teen Series” and I wanted her to be more in line with them in appearance. Her outfit became something more like a street racer’s and is supposed to be covered with patches and logos, even if I leave them out of a lot of sketches. I think sporty clothes suit her well, I love outfits that have a sexy side and a practical side to them. Since the other Heavens Squadron members have a dominant color, eventually I decided that Tomcat’s should be white but she has light greys with black and gold for emphasis here and there so it doesn’t look too sterile. She also gained a little cat bell alongside her dog tags about here.
The NO STEP warning and the number 6 patch on her bottom are some of my favorite parts of her outfit. Put together it kind of comes off as “Stay off my ass,” which fits her attitude nicely.
I think this is about where I was pretty satisfied with her basic look.
The girls’ armors in general have gone through a few changes, as mentioned above the original idea was to have the wings and engines around waist level but it sort of felt like they were just riding their armor instead of wearing it. The current general arrangement is for the engines and tail to rest at the small of the back with a ‘spine’ piece running the wings up to the shoulder area. In earlier takes the plane parts were spread out a bit more and Tomcat had a sort of unique arrangement where her intakes and wings were affixed to the shoulders themselves (the note about the shoulder clamps being padded and ‘comfy.’) Since Azur Lane and Girls’ Frontline were big inspirations, a lot of these designs sort of minimize the armor in favor of showing off the outfits underneath. In older sketches, the leg armor in particular is mostly limited to some straps and braces with big thigh panels and boots with landing wheels incorporated into them and the arms are basically bare. Alternative wing arrangements included them floating just outside the arms ‘anchored’ to upper arm braces and briefly, as forearm shields since wings both tend to house weapons and they’re just such nice big ‘shieldy’ looking bits. I was more or less approaching them from the angle of “how annoying would this be to pose with a toy?,” so a lot of the concepts were centered on how to leave the arms as free as possible.
Some of the broader ideas regarding what Sprites are and how they should look and act were gelling around here, which is when I began drawing them with light-up pupils instead of normal eyes. It’s an idea I’d sort of kicked around for another project but made more sense for a total non-human to have eyes that work differently than a person with nanomachines. Eishi’s have been missing for a long time so I’m considering retconning her into being a Sprite. The earliest concept when I sat down and went “I want fighter jets to turn into cute girls” was having them be ghosts or angels that emerged from the wrecks of downed aircraft, maybe even restless dead pilots wanting a second chance. Another idea was just plain androids, but a certain part of me just wasn’t satisfied with that. So, kind of cannibalizing an idea from a shmup concept, it was decided that they would be servants summoned from ancient relics- basically walking generators with a lot of power they weren’t able to actually use without human masters to give them devices to channel it through and/or permission to tap into it. This also provides a good excuse for them to have quirky personalities that a military/pseudo-military group would be willing to tolerate. So the final form of the Sprites ended up being ‘data beings’ of unclear origin brought out of black slabs from an old civilization that used them as some sort of archives.
Worth pointing out in the original blonde ‘Cat, it’s partially visible she’s wearing gauntlets with pylon attachments on them so she sort of got downgraded then gained them back later. The arm bracers the girls wear both function as deflector shields and hardpoints for weaponry. The leg reinforcements were originally intended to be specifically for carrier-based planes’ use but seeing as how all Sprites are small enough to work on one they basically all get some kind of leg armor.
Currently, Tomcat (and everyone else) are being steered in a more typical mecha musume-ish style but most of the outfits are being kept as ‘civvies.’ I had a few people wondering why I wasn’t drawing them more in the style of all the Guardian Legend stuff I used to post, and I didn’t have a particularly good answer seeing as how I love that stuff. The current iteration of Tomcat keeps a lot of her older design aspects but streamlined a bit to go with the form-fitting body armor. The skintight leotard parts are called Insulators- since the Sprites are effectively solidified data clusters, the most practical kind of armor they equip would be something that keeps their ‘signal’ from leaking out, right? Just don’t think too hard about how much skin some of the suits leave out. I just had to leave her her jacket though, it just doesn’t feel right without it there.
In short, I feel like the most drastic changes happened early on but once I settled on a personality I liked, her appearance settled in pretty solidly. She’s the sort who comes off as reckless, careless, maybe even a little dumb, but with sharp instincts and a lot of experience to back up her lack of taking things seriously. Tomcat is also infamously hard to keep track of in her off duty time, often wandering off into unexpected places looking for some kind of entertainment. At times, she’s been known to wander into enemy territory from time to time just to have lunch or mingle with off-duty rivals, generally to their annoyance. Despite that, she’s fiercely loyal to her squadron and sees them as her family.