Pictures of your characters

Red.Ink.Rain · Jan 24, 2009

Does anybody else do this? Sometimes when I write I have a specific person in mind for the character's appearance. Sometimes I have to go looking for the character before I can accurately picture them in my head.

Post pictures of your characters here, if you do this too.

nevada · Jan 24, 2009

I know suzanne brockmann does it. and jennifer crusie likes to make collages about her book while she outlines them. I once worked on a sci fi novel, (since abandoned) that i had pictures for. the female character looked somewhat like Kate Beckinsale in Underworld and i had a pic for the male character but my hard drive got fried and it was a modelling pic so i'll never find it again. never did that before, never done it since. very weird.

alyssalynne · Jan 24, 2009

I have heard of screenwriter's doing this. Some people put up pictures of the actors they imagine in the roles.

Ciera_ · Jan 24, 2009

I do this! I go looking for actors to put in my mind-movie of each book. The problem is that there really aren't that many teen actors. So I use 30-year-olds and just pretend they're young, mostly. When I'm imagining characters, sometimes I just instantly think of a certain actor/actress and HAVE to go look them up and find the right picture.

Kathleen42 · Jan 24, 2009

I don't, but one of the authors on Murderati had a post about it a few months back.

CharlotteAmbrose · Jan 24, 2009

This is me all the way!! As soon as I make up a character I think of someone who looks similar to help me "see them" - describe them better.

Claudia Gray · Jan 24, 2009

I usually start with a template -- an actor or somebody familiar -- but by the time I get well into the book, they look like themselves.

Weirdly, the other day, a girl who looked JUST like one of my characters came by me. I "recognized" her -- literally just thought, "Oh, look, there's Raquel" -- before I remembered Raquel wasn't real. It was extremely disconcerting.

She_wulf · Jan 24, 2009

Gads, I "cruise" model sites and keyword all sorts of "odd requests" to find that right face to fit my character.

If I was being "monitored" by the internet thought police, I would probably be investigated...imagine explaining why you need pictures of a twelve year old girl with reddish blond hair and freckles...Oh, and a sexy hunk (like the link below)

Here's a link to my current male "hero"
http://www.chadwickmodels.com/send/1476 Adam Barr is ... hot!

I prefer the Aussie model sites. They seem to have good looking, diversified talent, and aren't as prudish/proprietary as the American sites when it comes to posting pictures online. (reference 12 year old search above, US sites won't post pics of child talent usually, or you have to subscribe...for a fee....) That and I don't have to turn my "safe search" off to view half the sites. (Unlike most of the "model" sites in the US)

Of course, it was exceedingly difficult to find Asian male models. Oh, I got THOUSANDS of hits for "Asian model" and almost every click through was blocked by my content filter!!! :O

BTW, I won't use actors as a rule because their face/persona get in the way when creating the character. Brad Pitt will never star in one of my stories...at least not the written down ones...

Tepelus · Jan 24, 2009

I draw pictures of my characters on paper, I know what I want them to look like so I put pencil to paper and voila! They don't always turn out exactly the way I want them to look, but they are close enough.

Red.Ink.Rain · Jan 24, 2009

ClaudiaGray said:
I usually start with a template -- an actor or somebody familiar -- but by the time I get well into the book, they look like themselves.

Weirdly, the other day, a girl who looked JUST like one of my characters came by me. I "recognized" her -- literally just thought, "Oh, look, there's Raquel" -- before I remembered Raquel wasn't real. It was extremely disconcerting.

TOTALLY did that the other day with Dax. I was running on the treadmill at the gym, and this skinny freckled kid with messy brown hair walks past me and starts lifting, and I was like, "WTH? You're not REAL." I almost fell off the treadmill. Weird stuff.

peachiemkey · Jan 24, 2009

I can't decide if Ian Somerhalder is my MC's dead love interest or my MC's new love interest.

He's one of them, I know it. They'll have to fight over his face 'til I can find a second guy who meets my impossibly high standards.

(yes, I'm one of those girl writers who makes all their boy chars super hot. IT HELPS ME GET MOTIVATED OK)

I'm still looking for more faces to like, tape up onto my computer screen or something haha. I'm sure it would help the process of seeing my chars interact and do things in my head.

Red.Ink.Rain · Jan 24, 2009

In CoS all my boy characters are...not hot. Except for Shale and Matt, but you know, they're assassins and rapists, so no one cares anyway.

I'd post pics of my characters too, except I can't find out how to get them from my word document to absolutewrite. *shrug*

peachiemkey · Jan 24, 2009

oh come on, evil/corrupt hotties are the best kind.

haha.

hmm.. try copying and pasting into a Paint file, then saving and uploading? or not.

She_wulf · Jan 24, 2009

I needed a certain shade of red hair color, along with the right mix of higher contrast features for my current MC. I couldn't find it until I found this:

Siobhan Donaghy

Tanya Egan Gibson · Jan 24, 2009

I'm the least artistic person ever. (Trust me, my 3-year-old can draw more realistic-looking "people") Still, I sketch settings and characters, often just to get a bird's-eye view of what they might be *doing* in the particular place they are in, so I can visualize characters interacting with setting.

She_wulf · Jan 24, 2009

omg, found your bad boy!

Click on photo for more, but don't have your boss or kids in the room.

Red.Ink.Rain · Jan 24, 2009

peachiemkey said:
oh come on, evil/corrupt hotties are the best kind. haha.

hmm.. try copying and pasting into a Paint file, then saving and uploading? or not.

Oh, I love them - especially Shale. He's the seductive assassin whose identity is secret until the very end. Muhahaha.

Ciera_ · Jan 24, 2009

Mmm, Ian Somerhalder. Yummy in that slightly-too-ambiguous way. Okay, I mostly just like him cause he was on Lost.
Here's my MC:

ath · Jan 24, 2009

i do this, but i use the sims 2 to make them look how i want them,

i also surf 3d model sites, (i like that better than using an real people)

NeuroFizz · Jan 25, 2009

I've read far too many stories about stunningly beautiful women and rugged handsome men to be moved by such word-pictures. Interesting beats handsome and beautiful any day. Besides, the best characterization (to me) doesn't have detailed anatomical sketches. It lets me form my own picture of the person. Perhaps what most sets me askew is when a character is described in perfect terms appearance-wise, but has the personality or emotional flaws necessary to make that person more three dimensional. I can't explain why exactly, but it creates a mis-match in my mind. That, or it gets too close to the beautiful-but-superficial, or abs-of-steel-but-brains-of-mush stereotypes. Let's hear it for all of the "average Joe/Jane" characters out there.

Red.Ink.Rain · Jan 25, 2009

*throws confetti*

Yay Average Joe!

Cassiopeia · Jan 25, 2009

Well, I can't help it...my female MC's all look like me, in one fashion or another and my male MC's look like a combination of all the men in my life I've ever loved. And trust me, we are all average and far from perfect.

Zelenka · Jan 25, 2009

I have files on Picture Manager full of photos and screencaps from films of a similar era, bits of landscape or architecture or costume as well as templates for my characters. I usually start out with an actor in mind for a particular character but by the time I've fleshed them out and started writing, they don't look that way any more. It's more like the actor is someone who looks quite like the character, but not exactly right any more...

At the moment, despite having no similarity in terms of genre or style or anything to my book, my two main characters have ended up looking like Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding of The Mighty Boosh.

StevenJ · Jan 25, 2009

'Cristian Salazar' aka Salvador Dali & Count Robert De Montesquieu:

Shara · Jan 25, 2009

I tend to try and think of an actor or other famous person who might look like my character, and then print out a picture of that person and post it near by computer, to help me visualise them when I write about it.

The current MC is a tall, statuesque redhead with wild curly hair. So I decided - Nicole Kidman!

Shara

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