On this day, one year ago, I was drawn into this story where I subsequently fell in love with Worm. Though I liked the sequel, Ward better, and I read/listened to Pact and am absolutely loving reading Pale after my 3rd Worm and 2nd Ward reread; I haven’t been able to go a day without thinking about Parahumans. I used to doodle in class and at home, I’m not studying art, but I’ll watch a video here or there and I’ve got 30,000 photos and videos saved to my phone that I tell myself I’ll totally use for reference someday. That being said, I haven’t scribbled anything since March of 2025, I was designing my own superheroes but I was in a bit of a rut. So, when I read these serials and got hit with inspiration after looking at the subreddit and fanart and seeing that nothing quite came close to what I saw in my mind, I figured there’d be merit in doodling Worm. I finished these scribbles of the Arcs 1-8 Undersiders back on May 7th but I didn’t make this account until the 15th anniversary because I wanted this to be for specifically Parahuman/Wildbow posts so I didn’t understand Reddit or have enough karma to post until now. I did my best to strictly adhere to canon and WoG, if there are any discrepancies/issues/questions about design choices, PLEASE, let me know.
Here’s my thoughts and the general process I went through when designing each character. This turned into a goddamned mini-essay and I think my account for the Wards will be longer, so read at your own discretion.
I initially did some design doodles for Skitter, sketching out her armor, mask, hair and tools before I doodled the Undersiders proper. I feel the need to draw my ideas out on paper because I’m a primarily visual “imaginator” but the more I try to remember, the less I do, so I HAVE to draw these characters or else I’ll flanderize their design and lose them forever.
(Edit: crap, I forgot to list everyone’s height.
Bitch is 5’7, Grue is 6’1, Skitter is 5’7, Tattletale is 5’8 and Regent is 5’5. In centimeters that’s 171 cm for Bitch, 187 cm for Grue, 170 cm for Skitter, 173 cm for Tattletale and 166 cm for Regent. The doodle is at 1/12th scale as well.)
I started on the far right (because I’m left handed) with Alec and Lisa, I doodled them in about an hour and a half total, they were pretty easy to get down even with my weak points being everything. I looked at some reference photos for Alec’s hair, mask and shirt, and Lisa’s buckle and boots, then drew everything else based on how I saw them in my head. Does the Tattler look young enough while still looking like a 17 year old? Like, in that middle stage between child and adult. There’s no canon heights listed for anyone aside from a few characters so I based Tattletale off of Taylor’s height with the fact that Taylor has noticeably grown from Arc 10 - Arc 20, with her height being listed as 5’9 in 25.1 and 5’10 in 26.2; in WoG she’s listed as 5’7-5’8, 1 inch of height change wouldn’t be all that noticeable so I put Taylor at 5’7 and Lisa at 5’8, so that she’d still be taller than Taylor as described in 2.7 and 27.1. I think it’s Taylor that’s really fucking bad at guesstimating heights like with Brian in 2.6 and more as we’ll get to some other characters later on that have WoG confirmed heights/ranges that differ wildly from what Taylor states. Could chalk it up to early installment weirdness like with Taylor stating in 3.4 that her baton is 21 inches long and in 3.11 she states that it’s 18 inches.
Drawing Skitter was probably the most thorough design I had to think about (which pales in comparison to my process for the Wards) and I’m still not sure how to do her armor on the lumbar section of her back. Skitter’s eyes are a little far apart, that’s my bad but I didn’t want to erase and redraw the eyes because I’m terrible at keeping them symmetrical. In almost all fanart, the armor on her mask is only accounted for in the mandible section on her jaw but multiple times it’s stated that the armor is on the sides of her forehead above the eyes as well. In 8.5 the text states “I’d built the armor of my mask around the edges of the goggles so the actual nature of the lenses wasn’t immediately apparent, and to hold them firmly in place”. I could go on with more examples such as 3.8, 3.10, 5.7, 8.7 and 13.9, it’s like being told a ladybug is red with black polka dots but in every piece of visual media it’s just plain red, it bugs me (haha). It was a bit of a coincidence or maybe intentional on Wildbow’s part that the mask armor ended up looking like the silhouette of an ant or arachnid’s body, It wasn’t intentional on my part, but I found it to be quite cool. I did my best to make Taylor look as skinny as possible while still being believable, but I’m not very objective until I take a picture and look at it, I think I got everyone’s body types accurately, but I can’t be 100% sure. With Skitter’s design being as complex and thought out as it was, I took extra time thinking about the armor as well as taking into account every detail about it (like I said, I’m still unsure about the lower back armor). I was watching Bloodhounds on Netflix and when Yang-Jung catches up to a dude and cuts his Achilles tendons I was like “ooh that’s scary, I would not want that to happen to me” and I thought that Taylor might not want that to happen to her either so I changed the greaves design to encompass the whole lower leg rather than just the shin which I think makes for a cleaner, more consistent design. She wears her costume under her clothes so there’s obviously no hand armor or foot armor or she wouldn’t be able to look inconspicuous or wear shoes over it.
Brian and Rachel were a breeze, after procrastinating on Taylor for so long and finally reaching a point I was able to just keep doodling without overthinking, I still spent hours perusing the text, wiki, and google to get their looks down. I googled motorcycle leathers and found pictures that looked good enough for what I wanted and googled what a black skull would look like to make sure I got the lighting down good enough. I debated adding Rachel’s dogs because I’ve never drawn dogs before and I don’t know dog breeds, but Brutus, Judas and Angelica are part of the team for Arcs 1-8. I googled and traced the outlines of stock images for the dogs and then filled in the detail as best I could. Rachel is the only one without a mask so I couldn’t cheat my way around drawing her face, I made sure to capture that her nose had been broken multiple times and that she “wasn’t attractive” without making her look like a caricature; I hope I was able to make her look “ugly” while still looking like a burly teenage girl. I never realized that Angelica was that small, I subconsciously filled in that she was like a pitbull terrier because that kind of matched the aesthetic of a mean, bad ass dog and I imagined Brutus was a really big bulldog for whatever reason.
I want to draw all of the capes we see in the first 8 or so Arcs, so I’ll at least draw the Travelers, ABB, E88, the Triumvirate, New Wave, top Protectorate Heroes, and the Endbringers. Even though there is fanart for all of these aforementioned characters, they still don’t quite match the images I have in my head so I feel like scribbling out those ideas is still worthwhile. I love seeing everyone’s interpretations of different characters however and I wish there were infinite artists in the community. I’ve got the Wards nearly finished and design language mostly finalized for both the Wards and Protectorate with ideas for what the adult heroes will look like. I’m not sticking to a schedule at all, this is mostly practice so don’t expect steady output of “content” or anything like that, I’ll post whenever I finish my doodles.
Please give criticism, just tear me apart, even if you say “This looks like shit!” I’ll yell “THANK YOU!”, any way I can improve is welcome!
