Ajax Design Refs and Notes

First, please excuse the roughness of the refs above; they're hardly the best drawings I've ever made of Ajax (that stiff pose and the almost-straight-on face ugh), but if I agonized over them any more I'd never get them done. Regardless, I hope that the key details of his construction and design clarified above (and detailed below) will help people translate him into their own styles.

Second, warning: Rambling ahead! (This is how I think, so be prepared.)

I. Structural Design

Prior to my sitting down and formally designing him, Ajax's appearance had always been rather vague in my mind, and thus I only knew he was a generic, somewhat handsome white male. To some degree I had made him intentionally average -- I think because I like depressed characters to be intensely normal to look at, with no immediate evidence of their inner state. I wanted Ajax to be the sort of person you could pass on the street and not necessarily take note of (I might have failed at that). And I wanted him to be broad, as a reflection of the "sturdiness" I associated with him. That was all I went in with.

I started with his face and hair. I had made him in The Sims 3 years back -- he looked younger and more "prettyboy," and he had brown hair, green eyes, and a slimmer nose. But the strong jaw was there, and I liked the haircut -- short, with a prominent widow's peak. I didn't want him to look too much like young Agent 250, whom I'd been drawing a lot of, and in a bid to exaggerate the widow's peak, I gave him the forelock/not-quite-fauxhawk. His hair's not really wavy but also not perfectly straight -- it's thick enough that its volume overrides its straightness. It all moves up and forward -- a conscious choice to emphasize his widow's peak and to counterbalance his high hairline.

With the hair chosen, the rectangular "straight up-and-down-ness" of his design sort of solidified. The nose happened concurrently with the hair; I wanted his nose to become more patrician to further emphasize the widow's peak and forelock. In that first drawing on the app, the bridge and eyebrows were connected due to the angle of the head, but it quickly became a permanent fixture of his design. His nose geometry is very simple and rigid -- like sticking a solid block onto his face. He's an unusually uniform and symmetrical character.

His eyes were the consequence of both a lot of work and a happy accident. I knew I wanted him to have narrow, adult eyes with permanent fatigue wrinkles underneath (to me this was THE essential part of making him look definitively 29), and I had quite a war with them before the slight downward angle of the head on the app accidentally resulted in those hooded, somewhat almondine eyes he has now. The key is not too make them too big -- the pupil is usually no more than a dot, and the iris is quite flat and pale color-wise, making it appear even smaller than it is.

I worked downward to his neck and shoulders. As a consequence of his guarded personality, I knew that he would probably stand and sit in an emotionally closed way, and somehow this meant he needed low, sloping shoulders, with greater emphasis on the trapezius muscles than the deltoids. Parts of his clothing design accentuate this -- his hoods, scarves, and collars exaggerate the traps a little. With clothes on, his neck and shoulders usually form a nice, continuous curve with little delineation between them. The broadness I wanted him to have was reflected here; his shoulders are roughly three heads wide.

The idea of the tattoos peeking out at his collar came late. I was disappointed that his tattoo sleeves would never show, given his gravitation toward heavy, layered clothes (which was part his personality and part my wanting to give him bulk), and the tattoos peeking was my solution. In the end they, too, emphasized the aspects of his neck/shoulders that I just discussed.

From then on it was pretty much a straight shot down. He's lost some muscle definition since the full-body picture on the app and gained in bulk a little -- an effect of both my improved understanding of "useful muscle" versus "visual muscle" (compare boxers and bodybuilders) and my desire to simplify his structure. His clothing choices also tend to hide and smooth out any muscle bulging anyway, as good menswear is designed to do, so there wasn't much point in the muscle definition to begin with.

Likewise, he doesn't have much in the way of hips or butt to speak of -- as I said, straight shot down -- and his jackets and coats hide any waist or hips he might have had.

II. Clothes and Color Scheme

Clothes- and color-wise, many of the design choices were happy accidents. His main outfit, the one in the full-body on the app and illustrated above, was actually his "formalwear" outfit in The Sims 3 -- before I decided to make him fashionable, he was a boring white T-shirt sort of guy. The layers fit his personality and give him the illusion of bulk, and he virtually never wears fewer than three layers, even in warm weather.

Originally his jacket was a darker, duller brown; I made it more orange to better contrast his jeans and hoodie. His original brown hair then clashed with his jacket, but the charcoal color of his boots and gloves offered an appealing dark accent to an outfit with a lot of midtones, so I made his hair the same to further emphasize that. The hoodie had always been a teal; I brightened it to provide relief from the more muted colors and then, given that his original green eyes seemed out of place now, chose a lighter, duller shade of teal to become his eye color. The jeans were just a standard denim/navy color, but it provided a nice counterpoint to the orange-brown jacket and the white T-shirt (which stayed to balance my mids and darks). To make the whole outfit less boring and to make Widget fit more cohesively in the final image, I added gold accents. The muted purple color of the tattoos came about because I wanted them to appear as if they had faded over time, but ultimately they served to emphasize the gold.

His alternate outfits all utilize the same or similar colors. The teal occurs somewhere in every outfit to bring out his eyes, usually as an accent of varying prominence. The charcoal is a useful dark neutral, but it also creates an appealing uniformity in his design by matching his hair. The navy has become the color I associate with him most; it doesn't match anything directly but instead nicely brings out all his features.

The warmer and brighter tones of brown, orange, white, and gold serve as counters and balances to those three colors, and they shift in order to better deal with the composition of each outfit. For example, the alt outfit with charcoal pants and navy jacket didn't need a sharp orange-brown to counteract the teal like the main outfit did, so his gloves and scarf became more muted beige and salmon colors.

III. Posing With Regards to Personality

Ajax could easily be a physically imposing character, but he's not. A lot of this has to do with his posing. He's a somewhat withdrawn personality, always fixating on others rather than himself -- and when he does focus on himself, he tends to brood. So his poses reflect that self-effacing quality: he seldom stands or sits at full height, always tucking his hands into his pockets or folding his arms across himself. In an odd reflection of the way I designed him, he tends to lead most movement with his head and shoulders, with the rest of his body sort of passively following behind. When walking, he's more inclined to hold himself straight, but his head is always tucked down a little -- he's a sidewalk-starer.

In general, he's not a confrontational person -- his status as a protector of others is a little misleading in this regard. He tends not to actively challenge others; he's more of a bulwark standing in the way of aggressors. He doesn't often look directly at people as he talks to them: he'll angle his body away but allow his eyes to track the person, or face them but avert his eyes. He's a man of half-gestures like that: one-armed shrugs and tilted smiles. But even these gestures are oddly warm and comforting in the affection that underlies them. In some ways, he reminds me of a lit fireplace on a winter evening or a heavy blanket on a rainy day.

He's left-handed. I don't know if that's really relevant. He's always been left-handed, even since the very first inklings of him. I've always had something of a fixation on Ajax's hands; he's an "actions speak louder than words" sort of man, and the actions most relevant to his character (i.e. fixing things) are often carried out by his hands. His hands do not make half-gestures, instead moving firmly and decisively. When Ajax is close to someone, it's typical for him to reassuringly grasp their shoulder, to smartly ruffle their hair or twist their hat, or to quickly pat or caress their cheek to focus their attention.

He has a lot of nervous tics. He's generally very reserved, so I wanted there to be a variety of dead giveaways when stress gets the better of him. Most of these also have to do with his hands -- they shake whenever he's stressed, and a lot of his tics have to do with trying to hide the tremors. He'll clench and unclench his fists, push his forelock back from his face, grip his trouser legs at the thighs, or just outright start smoking to calm his nerves. He'll withdraw even further physically, almost like a turtle -- more emphasis on those shoulders again. I think the layers of clothing are an aspect of this as well -- he tends to shrink into them when distressed, but their bulk hides this a little.

In retrospect, "bulwark" is probably the best description I have of him. He's... sturdy. Solid. He's hard to provoke, and when he is provoked, he'll get icy rather than aggressive -- he'll shut you out sooner than fight. He's more "immovable object" than "unstoppable force."