'cause someone had to do it.
Inspired by Dr.Twisted's wonderful guide to demons, I've noticed that the other side of the spectrum has quite a few problems as well, and being the angelology nerd I am, decided to make a guide.
Before starting, I'm going to leave a disclamer:
This is a guide for Abarhamic angels.
Anything else is fair game, (fandom, other religions, ext.) This isn't for them.
(Abarhamic religions are Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. They'll all be considered equily accurate for this guide.)
Table of contents
Quick fixes to common problems
Apperance
Behavior and purpose
Hiarchy
Names
So, first off, we're going to take a look at the typical Feral Heart angel.
Yeah.
Making this character nearly killed me.
So, the most glaring problems here:
1. The name. We'll go into 'proper' angel names later, but for the love of well, angels, why are they all named Sky? Other common names include Skye, Cristal, Blu, and Jewel. None of these are anything close to what angels are traditionaly named. And it's never capitolized.
2. Feral Heart will have you belive all angels are female.
I can't even begin to go into how wrong this is. If anything, they're mostly or all male, or more likely genderless. Occurances of 'female' angels are noteworthy and tend to be singled out in historical texts, so we can assume they're quite rare if they exist at all. This is also consistant with Medival socity's (where most texts on angels come from) veiws on women, so it makes sense that there'd be less of them because of historical sexism.
3. Angel is always spelt angle. Always.
4. Bat wings. For some reason, most angels I see have bat wings. Now, this isn't nessisarily wrong, as no one really knows what angels looks like (certinly not what we usually think, they are not models nor babies) and I can understand doing it for the purpose of individuality, but it just doesn't really make sense. Unless you've got a fallen angel (which are something we'll get into later), there's a pretty good chance you should go with feather wings.
5. White body, cyan Celtic markings. This isn't bad in itself, but there are more colors you could go with. Honestly, if we look at some art of Islamic angels that I grabbed from wikipedia:
6. Bright blue eyes and bright pink noses. This isn't so much something to do with angels as it is an overused design in general, and honestly, it just looks noob-ish. I'd stay away from that, unless it really, really works woth your color scheme.
7. Eyecover manes. Again, not really a problem as so much just overused. I've actually never seen an angel (aside from my own) with something else.
So, if you're thinking "then what do they look like?" read on!Section Two: Apperance
So, before I go into this, it's worth noting that angels' apperances vary heavily, especially accourding to their rank or position.
Take a look at these:
Yes, that last one is one angel.
So, they can look really, really weird, basically.
Because of this, there's no one way to make an angel. But some common themes are that:
1. They're people with wings
2. They're anything but people with wings
3. They're very colorless
4. They're very colorful
See what I'm getting at, here? There's no right or wrong way to make an angel, but please, please don't do the white and cyan thing.
Oh, and mass markings and object packs are your friends. Just make sure you stick to things that would be applicable to their rank.
