If you're confused as to what the heck this is then give my website a look, it'll explain it far better than I ever could.

The one part that always scared me when I was writing my story was and, to an extent, still is the character design. I'm not an artist, I won't even pretend. I have a decent grasp of the fundamentals from a large amount of doodling I did in high-school and my brief, dismal, experience in art college, but I think I'm improving. The old adage 'practice makes perfect' is true and I think I've improved most of the designs quite a bit, to the extent that I find most of the old designs to be embarrassing by comparison. Now I just need to figure out how to draw bodies and we'll really be in business, probably gonna have to use a bunch of references until it finally clicks. 

For those interested here are a few side-by-sides.

Death: No, that's not Batman, it was mostly an exercise in shading.

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Ellie: I think just about anything looks better than that piece of asparagus.

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Ghost: More of a redraw to get the shading down, I actually like the original design quite a bit.

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Inferno: If you look real close at the original you'll see that I forgot to add in his shoulder muscles and did a horrible job drawing them in, I like the spiky aesthetic though.

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Kid: I used a reference for the chest and decided that perhaps I can't quite draw hair yet so braids'll have to do.

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Medusa: What can I say except that's quite an improvement. I still can't draw faces though.

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Pestilence: This one was unfortunately botched, I totally screwed up the 'hair' design which added an excellent movement to the design, I'll have to work on that later. Otherwise it was mostly shading.

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Pixia: Damn that first one is ugly, the redraw is definitely far less cartoon-y and looks a bit like Helena Bonham Carter stuck her finger in an electrical outlet, which isn't a bad thing.

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War: The old one looks like some sort of fungal growth you'd be distressed to find in your basement and the redraw looks like he'd be named Chad.

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Unfortunately a large amount of the nuance in the shading has been lost in the scanning process, the scanner I'm using is an actual hunk of garbage. In-person the pencil strokes (I'm using a basic mechanical pencil to draw these) blend together and give the drawings a far smoother look. I might have to see about getting a new, higher quality, scanner.