[Cog Style Guide]
Welcome to the "Cog Style" guide from Boothworld Industries! This guide is for drawing your Cog characters, or to help plan their appearance.
Some important notes/TOS:
This guide assumes you already know a bit about Toontown, and the Cogs. This guide is not made by a professional character designer, and just made for fun. This guide is not to be taken as "THE" way to design Cogs, and its just the personal opinions/observations of the Webmaster and how I design mine. :]
(Please note: I will not be mentioning specific servers here, or using them as guides, such as Corporate Clash. This guide can be slightly bended to fit whatever server you're drawing!)
[Part 1 - The Basics]
Lets start with the basics, such as understanding the shapes and general flow of their designs before getting into specifics like their department. If you're designing your own department, or using a department not from the standard four, you can still keep these notes in mind to help plan them and keep them consistent. This is more of "understanding".
[General]
These are for notes on how the Cogs look in general, and less department specific.
-Faces-
There are various and many different types of face shapes the Cogs can have. They can range from more "human" appearances to more cartoon-ish or "object head". Below are some examples.
Some notes about this chart: I did not include any "duplicate" models. (Such as Cold Caller/Short Change and Bean Counter/Downsizer.) I was mainly basing this off of their head shape, but I did count some of their features. (Such as lips, mustache, eyes,) I did not count having "unnatural" skin tone (Such as pink or purple.) towards the "Cartoony" section.
Anyways, lets expand a bit more. The "human" side is, well, very human looking. *Although* this doesn't mean you should just make a normal looking human. The Cogs have lots of wrinkles, big smiles, and their eyes are often closed. Not to mention, they have very exaggerated head shapes. (Such as Mover&Shaker being a flat out rectangle, or Cold Caller being a square.) You can see what I mean by just drawing how you normally do heads, and then outlining the head shape of the Cogs. (More on shapes later.)
On the more "Cartoony" side we have the robotic heads, animal heads, or just strange. I use the word "Cartoony" very lightly since being "Toon" is a common lingo. (Its literally their opposition- I hope this part makes sense.) So this is to say, how do I make my Cog heads unique without turning them into Toons? Well, I have a few pointers.
1. Try to keep the head simple. The language should be in the shape. Seriously, just draw a random shape and try to work with it! Theres alot you can do with things like hair, teeth, eyes, and that silhouette. Try not to clutter the face with lots of jewelery, colors, or face markings like makeup. Or atleast, make these easy on the eyes. (Such as using color complimentary lipstick or eyeshadow.)
2. Try not to go too crazy with animal heads. Now I should say, this is just a bit of a personal pet peeve.. so take it with a grain of salt. But I feel alot of people go a bit overboard with making animal head types, or atleast adding alot of animal features to their Cogs. Which isn't too big of a problem- since in old concept art we see Legal Eagles with birds nests. But sometimes I think.. "Thats just a Toon in a suit?". So a way to combat this and to differentiate them from Toons, is to add some "robotic" flair to them. Take for example the Advocates from Corporate Clash. (I know I said I wouldn't use other servers but just this once I prommy.) Clearly are meant to resemble cats, but have devillish horns and yellow eyes that add that bit of "not exactly organic" flair.
To help with maybe understanding how to shape heads, heres a old concept doodle from one of the original artists on the team, Bruce Woodside.
Some misc recommendations for drawing Cogs: Cheekbones! I like to give mine very defined cheekbones. Wrinkles! PLEASE DON'T BE AFRAID TO GIVE THEM SOME DAMN WRINKLES!!! Like smile lines or eyebags! TEETH! Many of them have their teeth showing!
Of course, I have no idea what you're planning on designing! These are just tips you can keep in mind. But I would recommend not making the face overly cluttered *if* you're not going to have them in the default suit. Characters like the Corporate Raider and Number Cruncher can get away with having "more" on their face since their suit is just like the rest of them. Which leads into our next section...
-Suits/Body-
Although this part is in regards on how to draw *default* suits and not custom clothes, I highly recommend reading thru it anyway for pointers on how their clothes function.
I'm going to touch on body types here very quickly, since its a bit of a repeat of "heads" section. And the Cogs essentially have the basic body types. Being: fat, skinny, and muscular. You can bend these to be more specific. :] (Like having more hip, or being pear shaped!) I want to note, I don't really see the need to.. "restrict" what body type you "can" draw your characters as. So really, just do these to your hearts content. But if you're curious for how they're drawn canonly, or how to get better at drawing bodies in general, heres 2 pointers:
To the left is a image I edited together of the basic chest shape of the three body types. The right image is a concept art from one of the original artists, Bruce Woodside. Which can be used as a more in-depth look to not only the body type, but the shapes of the Cogs as a whole. Shapes are very important to how the Cogs are designed. They're sharp, broad, and angular.