I'm currently designing characters and locations for The Drawing Website's  Level 2 lessons. It's going to be done in the form a of a comic book story and as such, this particular part needs some new characters designed. Here's a small example of what I'm doing and where I'm at. 

I'm working on designing the antagonists of the story.  One male, two females.  They are meant to be Latinos, but also "punks" or hoodlums.  What I'm going for here is three characters that have a threatening look, but that also come across as "ethnic."

I'm a Latino, and as such, I know that there isn't a "Latino look." We come in ALL shapes and colors.  Blue eyed, light skinned blondes, Blacks, Asians, mocha skinned Mayans and everything else.  And it's not as simple as putting a sombrero on a character because not all Latinos are Mexican.

Still, I had to start somewhere. At first I decided to just draw a tough guy (AXEL) but that didn't go anywhere.  He didn't look ethnic enough. And if anything. the character looked Asian.

Below, you can see me just throwing ideas out.  While working on this page I was constantly looking at reference or other artists to see if anything would trigger a direction I could take:



I finally found a direction I wanted to take the guy and started playing around with some variations:



Below you see what I decided his final look would be.  I then started working on designing his girlfriend (VALENTINA).  The Valentina's hair was really the big challenge:



I thought I had gotten the hair the way I wanted and then started designing her body.  She was much too thin and generic so I thought I give her some heavy curves.  I also started playing more with her costume.  Once I had what I thought was good, I moved on to the Axel's sister (ARIANA). 

For Ariana, I decided to make her look the opposite of Valentina so I decided to make her tall and skinny:


I decided I was not satisfied with the Valentina. She and Ariana still had too similar a look, so I played some more with her body shapes.

I even did a line up of the character shapes and worked on the Valentina's costume a bit more.
I also started designing props and backgrounds. I had a ton of photos I'd taken when I visited Italy years ago. They came in handy.  I plan on developing the backgrounds more in the comic itself but I needed a direction to go in:


Still not satisfied with the Valentina's hair and face, I gave it another shot.
I actually looked at a video that showed me how a woman could wear her hair like this so I would know how it "worked."  Then I exaggerated it:



Now that I've got what I think I want, it's time to write out the script so I can start thumbnailing the comic.

Almost all the reference material I used to inspire the drawings above I put on my Draw Fu Pinterest board. If you want to take a look at it, you can go to it by clicking here:
http://www.pinterest.com/daarck/draw-fu-comic/

This e-mail wasn't as directed at solving your drawing problems as other e-mails have been in the past. This is a bit more of a "how the sausage is made" e-mail. I hope this was insightful. If you don't want to see any more of these behind the scenes things and just want me to give you more drawing pointers instead, let me know.


Luis

P.S.
If you haven't joined the Draw Fu Facebook Group come on over.  There's some great discussions about all kinds of drawing things going on there.  You're missing out:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/697412070274059/.