Zara - Reference Sheet 2025

She's in love with the stage and its roar.

She's the main vocalist of The WornDown Children.

She tries to stay positive all the time. She really tries. She doesn't like the other thing.

She likes ramen, the rain and singing.

She joined the theater club in highschool and left it a year and a half later. She never talks about it.

While not the only one, she was in an on and off relationship with a guy from highschool to her mid 20s. Each time they got together the messier it got. 

After the theater fiasco she joined her friend Liliana who she met while kids and they started writing songs as a duo.

Diana, another friend from those days would join later as the new guitarist as well as Tony and Davo, another pair of old friends she had grown apart but are now reunited through music.

Later through the band, while looking for a technician she met RJ with whom she later would start a relationship with.

She had an important role in a Christmas play when she was 7, that's when she fell in love with the stage and from that point on she knew what she wanted to do with her life.

Zara is the adopted daughter of a young couple of office workers who did their best to help her and support her pursuit of the performing arts within reason.

She’s currently living with two of her bandmates, Diana and Liliana, now Lil 

…

Now, be honest with me… do you think I'm overdoing it?

Last year I began this idea of doing an “official presentation” for my characters accompanied with a nice illustration of them. But I let it pending because I've been doing other stuff.

Well, here I am retaking this project, but different. When I saw the Diana picture next to her old ref sheet I got the feel that I should finally update the old refs. 

I had though it before but I've been avoiding for a while because it is kind of a big project, as it is not only the ones from the six members of the band but with them being on the same format I’d also have to update the ones from Tina, Diego, Tak and a super secret 10th, for now, here undisclosed character that we may or may not have even met yet one which makes the idea kind of annoying. 

But it will be done! Eventually. I'm for the moment just starting with the main 6 members of the band (or technically speaking 5 and co.) and Zara goes first. 

This is the first one I've done and thus for the prototype for the format I'll use, and with this I mean the formats. Another thing that had me avoiding this was I knew I'd end up making them too big. 

I knew I wanted to update them to the 2 views format like the whisperers ones but I didn't want to scrap the expression sheet on the side. And I'm glad I did because that's the part that convinced me that making this was a good idea (While making it) because yeah, my style has changed but the characters on the ref are more or less the same as the old ones. Some more than others. But I feel my style has also gotten more expressive and adding that to the reference I think represents the spectrum of my art well. From the sober and detail technical views to the silly looking expressions on the side.

Besides, I guess I do know them better now.

And that's why there's 3 versions of this sheet. One that includes everything and two more compact for easy distribution.

I don't know how much it will take to have all of these new sheets done, I hope it's not too long, I'm going to do it between projects. The good thing is that the front view of all the characters is already sketched out and that's like half of the work done.

As for the illustrations that were going to be the presentations of the character in the original plan, I still have some of them sketched and I'll finish one of these days but now as their own thing.

I'm also including the old version for comparison and because I never really shared the full res versions of those so here it is.