What is Not another Cliche!?

Not Another Cliche is a Webcomic series about a girl named Sky, a smart but socially awkward young girl who has just enrolled on a prestigious university program. She is thrust into an adventure in a dangerously whimsical, art-inspired fantasy virtual world called Artisan. And along the way Sky makes friends with a talented blacksmith named Ackee, Lucas, one of the most skilled fighters in her club, his sister Bee, and Kay, a genius with computers. Together, they get up to all kinds of fun and sometimes terrifying things, with the only limit being their own creativity and imagination.

Sky's Visual Development

When I was first designing Sky I knew I wanted her main colour to be blue, to complement the other main character who had a purple colour pallet.

I wasn’t sure what direction to take her fashion at this point as I didn't know how old she would be in the webcomic yet, so I decided to focus on picking a hairstyle for her.

I know I wanted something that was simple and easy to draw as far as hair styles since Sky was a character that I would be drawing a lot as she's the main character. The first draft of her design was this dungarees dress with a yellow top under it, that later got scrapped as it felt a little too childish.

After developing the world of the story a little more, I finally settled on her first outfit. A simple white dress. The idea behind this was to basically hide everything about her with this outfit that you later find out is something of a school uniform. Within the story new students are known as blanks, short for blank canvas meaning although they are new to the world, they have the pertential to become whatever they want.

But I also knew I didn't want Sky to only have this one outfit for the whole story, and so I decided early on, that I wanted to have different outfits for new story arcs when needed.

With the next outfit I wanted it to show Sky's personality along with were her mindset was while also being practical far what was happening in the story, which happend to be the training arc.

For the training arc of the story, I wanted to keep Sky’s design pretty similar to something you’d could wear in the real world, to signify that Sky’s mindset is still based on earthly logic rather that Artisan’s. Although she is enjoying the world so far, she still has much to learn.

Ackee's Visual Development

Unlike Sky, I knew exsactly what I wanted Ackee to look like since I had already decided her personality. So Ackee didn't go through as much changes.

Orginally I wanted to play around with a specfic anime trope for her called "dere tropes" or "dere types". If you are familliar with anime you've probably heard the word tsundere refuring to a character that seems harsh at first but is actually pretty sweet once you get to know them. in short dere tropes are character short hands for certain personalities types. And I wanted Ackee to be based on this concept, but ended up change that last minute.

Monster Development

One of the first monster designs I came up with was Da Mascot, it is a weak-ish slime monster that puts on the fasard of an animal mascot. So although I wanted them to look cute, they also needed a kind of unsettling vibe to them.

The second Monster was this Mimic that was known as Gradoc. Inspired by Sky's fare of failour and dissapointment.

More Will be added to this soon.