Aquamarine

 ~ DOLLY BIRTHDAY ~

July 5th is Dolly's birthday! All of my Aquamarines are very special, but Dolly is part of the original pair of characters I made for my college project, 'Aqua Salvation', which you now know as 'Aquamarine'.

As with the other birthday posts, I'm going to talk about how Dolly came to be. For the original project I only planned to design one character, but my teacher suggested I make another character and Dolly is who I came up with. I made Atlas with the concept of "optimist" in mind, so Dolly was made to be their opposite, a "pessimist". I think that her current iteration is far from pessimistic and has become more of a blunt, reserved character gaining hope and discovering herself.

Okay so now I'm going to show you the original concepts for Dolly (May 2024) and you have to promise not to get scared. Just kidding. Not. I personally can't stand looking at her original concepts because because she was originally white and it kills me to look at. But for the sake of going in-depth, I'm gonna show you.

These were Dolly's very first early concepts. I experimented a bit on scarf placement but ultimately decided on the good old 'scarf over the shoulders'. The words on the side "makeup, quiet, feminine, [Dolly] Parton" are words that people associated with the name "Dolly" upon asking.

I eventually decided to make Dolly black because it fit the mental image I had far better. I wanted a character with flat, gelled finger waves, a Betty Boop-ish character. So I adjusted her accordingly.

This was Dolly's final character sheet that I submitted for my college project. I'm really fond of her original design and she's probably the Aquamarine with the most design iterations. She's gone through 3 different outfit designs (with plenty of other concepts I scrapped) but I'm still really fond of her original version. The influence of an orca is far more clear in this design with how the white halter mimicks the markings of an orca's body. I do mourn that this influence is lost in Dolly's current design, but who's to say I can't just use this design too? I haven't drawn it in a while but I should...

Jump to October 2024, the time when I started thinking about Atlas and Dolly again since finishing my project. I decided I wanted Dolly to have a more 'casual' design since walking around in a wetsuit all day isn't very practical. I adhered to her original design pretty closely, replacing the wetsuit with compression sleeves and leggings. The halter dress became a turtleneck halter and she wore white boots too. It's also the first instance of Dolly wearing a ribbon bow which has become probably the most iconic part of her design. I think I gave her a ribbon bow because the original halter dress had a ribbon on the back and I wanted to keep that aspect in her design.

I know I wanted a beret at some point but it didn't look quite right to me so I just left it as a concept. This comes back in her most recent and current design, but just a little different!

And now we're at modern Dolly! I think this design really conveys Dolly the best. A cute sailor-ish girl with a 60s mod touch. The previous designs were more practical and read her occupation better, but I feel like this one reads more like a uniform. I love her aquamarine tights...

You can probably guess, but Dolly was named after the sheep. A lot of her character is based on the sheep. Her name, her birthday, her origin story as a cloned and genetically modified human. It's pretty on-the-nose but I feel like all of my characters are that way ;-P

❤Happy Birthday Dolly!❤