It's easy to tell them apart, but they're not as pigeonholed as they sound. I'm not one for predictable or flat characters. Or, rather, I'm the queen of too much character development. ;)
Ye gads they're pale, but this has some meaning because they're from the part of the world where the story ends up. So they look foreign at the beginning, but by the end of the story it's the other characters who look like they don't belong. In my head it's kind of neat, but I'm not sure if this is going to come across much in the writing. They start off looking like mirror (reverse?) images of each other, but as the story goes on and they drop their carnival act in favor of the adventure, this starts to change, so I wanted to go with that instead of making them matchy-matchy (although Sol will always wear bright sunny colors and Etri will always be... well, goth). I'm pretty happy with these avatars, but I have such a clear idea in my head of what they look like that the avatar generator couldn't get them perfectly there. I'll admit I did kind of go crazy with the backdrops. But hey, one spends a portion of the story glowing like a sun and the other is half in the shadow-world at any given time. (Still looking for a good term for that. Shadow-realm? Plane of shadows? Mirror-reality? I'll think of something.) I wanted to play around with that kind of magic.
When I resized the images to fit on my blog, I realize how much I don't like how their facial expressions look when smaller. So here are closeups at the original size:
I also don't like how it's hard to see the shading, so Etri's shirt looks like a priest's collar. *headdesk* It's just supposed to be that he wears a lot of layers of clothing and keeps most of his skin covered. (Sol's barefoot because the generator didn't have a sandal option. He doesn't feel the cold; his magic gives him an abnormally warm body temperature. Etri wears layers because his body temperature is chilly, so he's always cold.) I added in their earrings and tattoos in Paintshop. Etri's were easy because they're mostly covered by his shirt, but he gets blue and black moons and stars while Sol has yellow and orange suns. Cheesy, but all of my circus people are kind of over the top. (I have no idea how I'm going to make an avatar of my mime with his silly hat. LOL! Stay tuned to see if I can figure that strange costume out.)
This is reminding me that I still haven't written up bios for any of my 2013 NaNo characters. I should get on that. And, ya know, finish my dang NaNo. The poor characters are in limbo and I think Etri is holding me back because he's seeing the evil glint in my eye directed at him. He should know by now that I torment my favorites more than the others. He should have seen his impending doom coming from a mile away. Mwahaha. But: favorite. It'll work out in the end.
~Meri
