12 Months of Dogs Of War - March (Josh)

I had planned to post my Dogs Of War characters in rough order of their rank within their teams, but realised it's more prudent to do it in the order I created them, as often describing the development process of one character may require referencing another character, which would be harder if we haven't seen them yet.

Anyway, here's Josh Cyril - the big, tough, slightly immature archetype of a character. Josh was the only character (other than Stylene) that was brought into to the Dogs Of War fold during the early stages of development. Back in the year 2000, when I was playing around with my characters, I thought of the idea of having them in a school setting - an idea inspired by the Warner Bros animated series Detention, which was been broadcast locally during that year. Of course, the only characters I had at that time were Stylene and one other (who didn't make it into DoW) so I needed to come up with some more. Grabbing myself the book 'How to draw dogs, Puppies and Wolves' by Christopher Hart, I came up with a bunch of additional characters, Josh being one of them. Josh had initially been planned to be the love interest to Stylene. Back then, the size difference wasn't as substantial so it wasn't an awkward paring, but over time the idea of these two being in a relationship fell out of favour. As mentioned last month, Sledge then became the love interest for Stylene, later replaced by Peter Edgewood. However several times in my DoW scripts I have had Stylene and Josh teaming up and it was something I felt worked really well. I realised that this was because their differences complimented each other perfectly (I've posted a blog entry in the past that covers this in more detail).