When I first started to get serious about wanting to draw, I began to collect how-to-draw books. (I still do by the way; I have a lot of them!) The very first one I ever got was Dragonart: How to Draw Fantastic Dragons and Fantasy Creatures by J. “NeonDragon” Peffer. I still have it in fact and still love it! As you can guess, it’s all about how to draw dragons. On one page she talked about different animals upon which one could base their dragon’s anatomy. One example she gave was a bird-like dragon, complete with beak, wings, and feathers (see image 3 above). I really liked this design, so I drew my own character based off of it (image 4). This was the first time I drew a character who I thought about adding to a comic.

In my head, I named this proto-Dilawar character “Pteryx” (pronounced “teh-rix”). My plan was to draw a series of one-off comics of Pteryx and a cartoon version of myself interacting, talking about geeky stuff like video games, etc. Pteryx was the silly, wise-cracking, sometimes sarcastic friend, and cartoon-me was the sane but nerdy human (because this was before I had discovered the furry fandom and made Ine as my fursona). I wrote down a few ideas for this comic, but never drew any pages for it.

Fast-forward to when I started making plans for Aww, Feathers! I’d already decided Ine would be one of the main characters. As I was filling out the roster, I remembered I had this character on the back-burner. I still really liked the design, so I thought why not give him an update! Instead of the borrowed bird-dragon design, I put his head on a big cat’s body, and started to develop the idea of there being both bipedal and quadrupedal characters in this story.

And the rest, as they say, is history! Dil really took on a life of his own and even became a fan favorite! I’ve loved developing him as a character!