Visual inspiration for you, um, your character

Suse · Apr 15, 2009

Just pure curiosity. Does anyone use photo's of models, film stars, etc, as inspiration for visualising their characters? Or how about paintings or busts of historical figures? It's taken a while, but I've finally completed a nice little portfolio, and I generally use an eye from this person, a smile from that one.

Actually, this is really just an excuse to show a couple of pix of my Hektor (the only good thing in Troy) for c.e. Lawson. He truly inspires me!

Mmmm!!

Mmmmmm!!!!!

Puma · Apr 15, 2009

Nope. Everything comes out of my imagination.

A while back I worked with a gal who was going to write a killer novel - but in all the time I knew her she labored on her portfolio of people, settings, etc. and never wrote word one. I kind of doubt she ever will. Puma

BardSkye · Apr 15, 2009

I'm not visual in that way. My characters tend to pop into my mind fully-grown, complete with idiosyncracies and habits. I have no idea where they come from.

But then, I find it hard to "see" people in my mind even when I see them in reality every day.

Doogs · Apr 15, 2009

I definitely tend to fall back on actors...not all the time...but sometimes I'll just have a visage pop into my head that just...works.

Usually this applies more to secondary characters. For example, when writing the Roman senator/general Marcus Marcellus, I couldn't help but envision Jack Hawkins as Quintus Arrius from "Ben-Hur".

Though...for some reason I can't quite explain, I seem to equate Alaric with Donal Logue...

firedrake · Apr 15, 2009

I confess to basing looks on Actors, although not feature-for-feature.

My male MCs bear a passing resemblance to either David Tennant or Douglas Henshall.

BAY · Apr 15, 2009

My imagination is a visual soup pot for every person I've ever met and when I need a character I drop the ladle down. That said, I came across two pictures that I taped on my wall. One was a photosnapshot winner in Parade of a sky that was perfect for a scene I was writing. And, a picture in a magazine resembled one of my secondary characters, so it went on the wall as well. I found them helpful, but not necessary.

I

jennontheisland · Apr 15, 2009

Nope. Never. I have yet to find a famous person who looks like any of the people in my head. I did stumble across a random pic on Flickr of someone once, though.

shokadh · Apr 15, 2009

Well, this should tell you a lot about me and my work:
I have pictures of the devil plastered all around my office. :e2seesaw:

But, yeah, I usually sketch out all of my characters because at some point I decided I wanted to "meet them in person" before they got too famous.

gwendy85 · Apr 15, 2009

I wasn't visual before. I draw my characters but sometimes you come across celebrity pictures and you just suddenly shout: "My God! That's him/her!"

I'll share a few ^_^

Kazuo Matsushima ( actor Takeshi Kaneshiro)
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y201/td_gwendy/tk.jpg

or

(actor Jon Foo)
http://www.filmofilia.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/tekken_1.jpg

Juanita Cazatela (actress/model Isabel Oli)
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y201/td_gwendy/io.jpg

Lewis Collins (actor Jesse Metcalfe)

http://barefoot.provocateuse.com/images/photos/jesse_metcalfe_02.jpg
--> Oh yeah, he looks exactly like Lewis Collins being captured by the Japanese...except for the smiling part haha

cooeedownunder · Apr 15, 2009

My charachters come completely from my imagination.

Suse · Apr 15, 2009

I really wish I could draw. My characters are big bags of emotions rather than fully formed physical people, so every so often I go searching for better images that might capture something of them. I really can't see them visually beyond fuzzy. But then, I couldn't describe accurately the facial features of my family or friends. I'd even have to look in the mirror to describe myself!

What I like is finding a facial expression. I've got a picture of Paris which is nothing like him, but if he were to cry, that's my boy.

Seriously, Douglas Henshall, Alaric? But Alaric's taller and leaner, surely? Helena Christen is my Helen. I see her pretty clearly.

donroc · Apr 15, 2009

Imagination.

JenNipps · Apr 15, 2009

I've done this one time only, but not for a historical. I accidentally found the MC for my contemporary romance in a catalog.

In my first historical romance, the MC hero came directly from a dream. I very rarely dream of actual people, so when I do, I tend to remember them.

Then in the second HR, I was on a trolley in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and saw the MC (in modern clothing, of course) walking down the road. He even sounded the way I had imagined my MC to sound. lol.

Kaiser-Kun · Apr 15, 2009

I must say the visual images of my characters are never fully-developed. I tend to focus more on their actions and lines, so I always give a blank stare when they ask me who'd act their part.

PastMidnight · Apr 15, 2009

Honestly, I don't even know what a lot of my characters look like. I tend to not describe their physical features much, apart from things like the occasional mustache or distinctive feature. I have a fuzzy picture in my mind at best (general body shape, height, etc.), but I couldn't pick them out of a line-up.

angeliz2k · Apr 15, 2009

Ah this is sticky or me. I am staring at three pictures I copied out of books. One of them is "Mr and Mrs William Hallet" by Gainsborough. I love it for the dress she's wearing. After copying it out of the book, I lost the reference, but then I saw it at the National Gallery in London and got way too excited. My undergrad class of "normal" college students probably thought I was out of my mind. "Ooh, oh, I know that painting!"

I'm also a visual artist. I love to draw but have been so busy lately that I haven't had time to do any drawing. I paint a little, too. I've drawn approximations of characters, and painted one likeness of a character from a story from long ago.

But....

I never have a very firm image of characters in books. This goes not only for my own stories but also people in other books. It also goes for people in real life. I am bad at recognizing faces. It seems that what I identify people by and notice is not their face per se but the expression(s) on it. I constantly watch and gauge the emotions and body language. This comes out in my writing. I have very few real firm descriptions of faces/features, but I go into some detail about characters reading each other's facial expressions and body language. I know some defining features of them, but if you put 'em in a line-up, I might not be able to pick 'em out unless they smiled or frowned or something expressive.

ETA: Here's "Mr and Mrs Hallet". I used it in the header for my blog; it IS a nice hat.

c.e.lawson · Apr 15, 2009

Suse said:
Just pure curiosity. Does anyone use photo's of models, film stars, etc, as inspiration for visualising their characters? Or how about paintings or busts of historical figures? It's taken a while, but I've finally completed a nice little portfolio, and I generally use an eye from this person, a smile from that one.

Actually, this is really just an excuse to show a couple of pix of my Hektor (the only good thing in Troy) for c.e. Lawson. He truly inspires me!

Mmmm!!

Mmmmmm!!!!!

Oh, good God. And with perfectly placed battle scars to boot.

Brad Pitt who?

Is there any way to give you 100 reps points for this post?

Actually, I love vivid and detailed visual images when I both read and write stories, and I love writers to describe their characters.

My characters come from my imagination, but occasionally I can say one is "sort of a combination of this celebrity and that one" or "his eyes are like Gerry Butler's" sort of thing, but the characters as a whole, physically, are distinctly mine and I can visualize them very clearly. That mental image comes up at the beginning - perhaps even before I have the personality in my head.

Tocotin · Apr 15, 2009

For me it's usually imagination first, then I sometimes run into paintings which resemble my characters. I once bought a CD just because of the face on the cover, and there's Caravaggio's The Fortune Teller (second version), which I believe is a portrait of my novel's MC who is a short, chubby boy, very naive and sweet.

I never see any of my characters in photos or movies or TV. Never. No idea why.

pdr · Apr 15, 2009

Nope!

Imagination. Some photos and illustrations/Paintings of the settings, houses, flora and fauna, things they would use, but not the characters.

ishtar'sgate · Apr 15, 2009

Not for my main characters. I like to keep them in my head. I did use an old newspaper photograph of two strange twins who showed up as witches in my last novel but other than that I've never used them. My avatar is the inspiration for a lion who plays an important part in my current wip but I don't have photos for my human characters.

san_remo_ave · Apr 15, 2009

My characters are all imagination so far. I'm a bit like PastMidnight in that I know their attributes but wouldn't recognize them if I fell over them. I'm the same way about reading other people's stories, too. I have a general sense of what characters look like, but can't really imagine them all together like a picture.

Inarticulate Babbler · Apr 16, 2009

Being a professional artist, I come from a very visual background. I can see a picture or painting (like Frank Frazetta's works:

;

;

;

) and I drift off into what could be. The high sense of drama and adventure remind me that characters aren't always pretty/handsome, and can be likeable more so for those flaws. I have described characters as actor, but only when the question was posed--after the work was written. More often, I get inspiration or ideas from imagery--I can picture the scene--and I learn what they look like as they step into the light (unless the character is famous, like Washington, but then I already know what he looks like).

shokadh · Apr 16, 2009

Those were very nice. Beautiful detail.

Inarticulate Babbler · Apr 16, 2009

Frazetta was the first fantasy artist. He started painting in the 1930s, and gave Conan the Barbarian his achetypical image. (He actually loved drawing and painting Tarzan, but couldn't conceive of how he's have perfectly cut and groomed hair in the wild, and not severe sun-tanned skin. It was a long time before publishers agreed with him.) He's one of the few artists who was told to paint what he wanted, that they'd find a book to fit it. Some of his most famous paintings were dones with a child in his lap or in an overnight session.

Can you tell I'm a fan? Lol.

Zelenka · Apr 16, 2009

I usually draw my characters, even if the drawing isn't that great. Same as sketching out locations and such, it helps solidify the details in my mind. Sometimes my characters come out looking like actors, but more usually it's like the actor is the nearest there is in the real world to my character, but it's not quite right. It's kind of like when you see the films where actors play real people. Often they look really like the person they're interpreting but they're still not identical. That's the best way I can find to describe it. I do keep portfolios of stuff that inspires me, built up at the same time as I do the original plotting. I'm very visual though. For the majority of the time I describe the scenes as I see them in my head and it can be like watching a movie.

With historicals I keep a folder of things like old photos or drawings (depending on the era) that I use as research too. Not quite the same thing, but it kind of goes in with the keeping a portfolio issue.

Visual inspiration for you, um, your character

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