Quick Facts
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Age
34
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Gender
Female
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Origin / Species
Human
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Origin / Species
Private Investigator
Details
✦
Personality
Sharp-tongued and relentlessly observant. Treats every case like a personal puzzle and rarely lets a client see her doubts.
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Abilities
No powers — just an encyclopedic memory for faces, a battered revolver she's never fired, and a network of informants across the lower districts.
✓
Strengths & Weaknesses
Unmatched at reading people and piecing together evidence. Struggles to trust anyone enough to ask for help when a case turns dangerous.
Character Lore
Coraline left the city police force after a case she solved correctly got buried by people with more influence than evidence. Now she works alone, taking on the cases the department won't touch — missing persons nobody's looking for, frauds too small to matter, secrets someone's willing to pay to either find or bury. She keeps a strict rule: she never takes a case from someone she likes, because liking a client clouds judgement faster than anything else. Her office above the Lindqvist print shop has a single chair for visitors and a wall of photographs no one else is allowed to look at too closely.
About This Project
Coraline was designed for a noir-style graphic novel pitch, where the brief asked for a grounded, human protagonist who could carry an entire visual identity through fashion and posture rather than fantastical elements. The main challenge was making a "normal" human character visually distinct in a genre full of trench coats and fedoras — the solution was leaning into a sharper, more modern silhouette with asymmetric tailoring and a single recurring prop (her father's pocket watch) as a visual anchor across scenes. Roughed out digitally in Clip Studio Paint, then finished in Photoshop with a muted, desaturated palette punctuated by warm lamp-light tones. This character sheet took about 16 hours and was delivered alongside three expression variants for use in storyboard panels.
