Strange Company is a big story with a big cast, and it follows multiple POVs. There are five main characters, whose perspectives the story follows most often: Raye, Helmi, Uriel, Gabriel, and Sam. Out of these five main characters, THE main character is Raye.
Raye is an energetic young woman with a mischievous streak. She’s also a bit directionless, and doesn’t know what she wants out of life yet. This becomes a point of contention between her and her mother, who pushes her to go to university. Raye doesn’t want to think about the future just yet. What she does want is to see the ghost that all the archaeology field school students have been whispering about.
As far as her design, I gave her freckles to add to that whole adventurous small town girl vibe that I’m going for with her. She’s quick to smile, but also has a bit of a fiery temper, often butting heads with her mother and other authority figures.
Because of her active style, Raye will typically tie her hair back in a high ponytail to keep it out of her face. When she’s dressed more casually at home, she’ll throw it up in a bun or in a loose ponytail at the base of her neck. She has longer hair in earlier sketches, though recently I’ve been drawing it a bit longer than shoulder length and more cut straight across.
Here are a few quick sketches of things Raye may wear in different scenes. She’s high energy and spends a lot of time outdoors, so she’s a fan of tees and shorts. She wears a lot of baseball style tees, as well as baseball caps. She’s probably also is a fan of jerseys. She’ll wear more simple styles of clothing, though she’s a fan of bright colors, leaning more towards cooler tones. The patterns she tends to favor are stripes and sparse florals. When it comes to dressing up, she’ll wear dresses, but instead of heels or even flats, she prefers dressy sandals. Her typical footwear, though, is sneakers since she spends a lot of time walking and climbing, and volunteers a lot of her time at the nearby excavation site.
Out of the five main characters of Strange Company, Raye is the only one who wasn’t born with an elemental affinity. Remember that ghost I mentioned before, though? Raye gets her wish and makes contact with it after sneaking into the underground ruins at the center of the excavation. This contact gains her an affinity to fire, which she needs to learn to control. She can’t do this alone, though, since she has no prior knowledge in the use of raw magic.
I want to do more posts like this in the future, focusing on concept sketches and the like, as well as some posts on how magic works in the world that Strange Company takes place. Look forward to more on characters, settings, and various bits of world building!