I'm not sure this is the best place for this thread, because I'm trying to overhaul both stories and visual designs. But I tend to draw characters first, and get story ideas as I go, so this felt like an appropriate forum choice? Apologies if it would have been better elsewhere.

So according to my profile I've been a member of Subeta for...woof 12 years now. The pets I have are the ones I started with. I must have been 13 or 14 at the time? In different spurts of activity, I've built on their stories and designs, but its been a long time now since I was active on the site. Now that I'm picking things back up, I'd like to move away from edgy stories written by a preteen and evolve those characters into something more.

But the problem is, I'm feeling really stuck. I don't want to completely scrap their old designs because I have a lot of fond memories of my time on this site working on my pets. So I'm trying to retain some key features, but it feels more like I'm just redrawing the old than branching out and adding anything new.

Any advice for getting out of this rut and getting those creative juices flowing like I'd like them to? I've never attempted such massive overhauls of old characters and these all need it. Their stories were also all tied together, so changing one sets off a ripple effect that might be part of my trouble. Where do you start when reworking a character?

I've revamped quite a few of my characters from my teenage years!

Usually what I do first when I'm about to redesign a character is I make a list (mental or physical, which ever works best for you!) of all of the design elements that I like and I'd like to keep as close to the original as possible!

After that I make a list of the parts of the original design that felt lack luster or not cohesive with the design, or even just things I feel like should have advanced with me as a person. I take those things and spend a little time planning out possible changes, maybe doing some research for things like clothing / hairstyles / etc.

Finally I do a rough sketch and plop down rough colors so I can see what I like and don't like! If you're working traditionally you can trace your sketch using the light of a window to make 'copies' of it to make it easier to test and retest colors, or if you're drawing digitally you can make new folders or files for each version as you test stuff out :)

If you do have an idea for your story / world, make sure to take that into consideration when doing your redesign. Maybe your world has changed, or parts of their story are changing, and so their design should also reflect those!

(If you want, I can also post some examples of redesigns I've done!)

oh man i def second everything said! i've re-worked a lot of old oc's and for me i usually just start off asking myself how i can bring what i like about this concept into the uhhh i guess aesthetic?? the res of my oc's have

so for most it's just making the designs less flashy/bizarre and stories more realistic :> like, for example one of my favourite reworks is my boy folie who looked like this when i was 14 and now looks like this like for him i loved the 'innocent clueless amnesiac boy in a horrible world' concept so that's what i kept tho uh also made it gorier along the way asdfghjkl but everything else?? y e e t

for some of my other reworks i don't really change the oc so much as just expand on it? like just write them as being older, but all the stuff they did/were when i originally wrote them is still canon does that make sense? i hope it does asdfghjkl

BUT ALSO don't let nostalgia paralyse you ' v ' at the end of the day these are your oc's and the whole point is that you like them, like if you feel that just tweaking them isn't enough don't worry about just, going in a completely different direction 👌