This one is half of a fireside chat since there’s really not much to talk about in terms of how we depict historical figures. We can talk fairy lore elsewhere.
Why do you guys draw fairies in chibis rather than mini-sized people?
So, I’ll say that outside of “peaceful” situations (example below where you can see Sieglaff pretending to be an ornament in Tautog’s art) where the shipgirls are “posing,” fairies are probably invisible.
In general, we’ve had different ways to draw fairies throughout Pacific (and related works).
In general, we’re trying to keep the style to be reasonably consistent. They’re about 2-3 heads tall, generally drawn to a super deformed style.
Part of what we do want people to do is to look up the historical figures associated with these people. Fairies are “mixed gender,” so to speak – there are boys and girls in a shipgirl’s “crew.”
However, we determined pretty early on in Pacific that we aren’t going to genderbend the historical characters for the sake of being cute. We really do enjoy it when people tell us they’ve “figured” out who a particular fairy is supposed to be.
Now, we aren’t perfect at this. When you shrink people down to 2-3 heads, a lot of their distinguishing features become blurred (as we learned from 2016). Since we don’t want to go the way of political cartoons and intentionally exaggerate certain features, we sort of do the “best” we can and hope that you can see the resemblance once you compare our art to their historical photos. Take Sieglaff up there, for instance.
You can see Sima decided to focus on his eyebrows and his cheeks and his (not actually pointed!) chin. The result is what you see up there. Again, it’s not perfect, but it’s (hopefully) recognizable.
Another example would be the guy below. He’s one of the historical figures associated with the Trout. We’ve actually mentioned him once on the site already, so it shouldn’t be too hard to figure him out.
In this case, his posture is also closely associated with his reputation and personality. Again, a lot of fairies look fairly generic (we’re still working on improving our art), but we hope to do even better in the future.