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Notes on Character Design
Character design and drawing are tome-sized topics and even if I had all the answers (I don’t - I have a lot to learn), I’m not sure I could communicate them effectively. I’ve gathered some thoughts and ideas here, though, in case they’re helpful.
First, some general things: - Relax and let some of that anxiety go. This isn’t a hard science. There’s no wrong way, no rigid process you must adhere to, no shoulds or shouldn’ts except those you designate for yourself. This is one of the fun parts of being an artist, really - have a heady good time with it.
- Be patient. A design is something gradually arrived at. It takes time and iteration and revision. You’ll throw a lot of stuff away, and you’ll inevitably get frustrated, but bear in mind the process is both inductive and deductive. Drawing the wrong things is part of the path toward drawing the right thing.
- Learn to draw. It might seem perfunctory to say, but I’m not sure everyone’s on the same page about what this means. Learning to draw isn’t a sort of rote memorization process in which, one by one, you learn a recipe for humans, horses, pokemon, cars, etc. It’s much more about learning to think like an artist, to develop the sort of spacial intelligence that lets you observe and effectively translate to paper, whatever the subject matter. When you’re really learning to draw, you’re learning to draw anything and everything. Observing and sketching trains you to understand dimension, form, gesture, mood, how anatomy works, economy of line; all of the foundational stuff you will also rely on to draw characters from your imagination. Spend some time honing your drawing ability. Hone it with observational sketching. Hone it good.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do this sort of thing better than Claire Wendling. In fact, character designs emerge almost seamlessly from her gestural sketches. It’d be worth looking her up.
- Gather Inspiration like a crazed magpie. What will ultimately be your trademark style and technique is a sort of snowball accumulation of the various things you expose yourself to, learn and draw influence from. To that effect, Google images, tumblr, pinterest and stock photo sites are your friends. When something tingles your artsy senses - a style, a shape, a texture, an appealing palette, a composition, a pose, a cool looking animal, a unique piece of apparel, whatever - grab it. Looking at a lot of material through a creative lens will make you a better artist the same way reading a lot of material makes a better writer. It’ll also devour your hard drive and you will try and fail many times to organize it, but more importantly, it’ll give you a lovely library of ideas and motivational shinies to peruse as you’re conjuring characters.
- Imitation is a powerful learning tool. Probably for many of us, drawing popular cartoon characters was the gateway habit that lured us into the depraved world of character design to begin with. I wouldn’t suggest limiting yourself to one style or neglecting your own inventions to do this, but it’s an effective way to limber up, to get comfortable drawing characters in general, and to glean something from the thought processes of other artists.
- Use references. Don’t leave it all up to guessing. Whether you’re trying to design something with realistic anatomy or something rather profoundly abstracted from reality, it’s helpful in a multitude of ways to look at pictures. When designing characters, you can infer a lot personality from photos, too.
And despite what you might have heard, having eyeballs and using them to look at things doesn’t constitute cheating. There’s no shame in reference material. There’s at least a little shame in unintentional abstractions, though.
Concepts and Approach:
- Break it down. Sometimes you have the look of a character fleshed out in your mind before putting it to paper, but usually not. That doesn’t mean you have to blow your cortical fuses trying conceive multiple diverse designs all at the same time, though. You don’t even have to design the body shape, poses, face, and expressions of a single character all at once. Tackle it a little at a time.
The cartoony, googly eyed style was pre-established for this simple mobile game character, but I still broke it into phases. Start with concepts, filter out what you like until you arrive at a look, experiment with colors, gestures and expressions.
- Start with the general and work toward the specific. Scribbling out scads of little thumbnails and silhouettes to capture an overall character shape is an effective way begin - it’s like jotting down visual notes. When you’re working at a small scale without agonizing over precision and details, there’s no risk of having to toss out a bunch of hard work, so go nuts with it. Give yourself a lot of options.
Here’s are some sample silhouettes from an old cancelled project in which I was tasked with designing some kind of cyber monkey death bot. I scratched out some solid black shapes then refined some of them a step or two further.
Here’s an instructional video by Feng Zhu about doing much the same thing (only way better).
- Shapes are language. They come preloaded with all sorts of biological, cultural and personal connotations. They evoke certain things from us too. If you’re ever stuck about where to go with your design, employ a sort of anthroposcopy along these lines - make a visual free association game out of it. It’ll not only tend to result in a distinguished design, but a design that communicates something about the nature of the character.
Think about what you infer from different shapes. What do they remind you of? What personalities or attitudes come to mind? How does the mood of a soft curve differ from that of a sharp angle? With those attributes attached, how could they be used or incorporated into a body or facial feature shape? What happens when you combine shapes in complementary or contrasting ways? How does changing the weight distribution among a set of shapes affect look and feel? Experiment until a concept starts to resonate with the character you have in mind or until you stumble on something you like.
If you don’t have intent, take the opposite approach - draw some shapes and see where they go. (It’s stupid fun.)
You might also find it helpful to watch Bobby Chiu’s process videos in which he feels out his character designs as he paints.
- Cohesion and Style. As you move from thumbnails to more refined drawings, you can start extrapolating details from the general form. Look for defining shapes, emergent themes or patterns and tease them out further, repeat them, mirror them, alternate them. Make the character entirely out of boxy shapes, incorporate multiple elements of an architectural style, use rhythmically varying line weights - there are a million ways to do this
Here’s some of the simple shape repetition I’ve used for Lackadaisy characters.
- Expressions - let them emerge from your design. If your various characters have distinguishing features, the expressions they make with those features will distinguish them further. Allow personality to influence expressions too, or vice versa. Often, a bit of both happens as you continue drawing - physiognomy and personality converge somewhere in the middle.
For instance, Viktor’s head is proportioned a little like a big cat. Befitting his personality, his design lets him make rather bestial expressions. Rocky, with his flair for drama, has a bit more cartoon about him. His expressions are more elastic, his cheeks squish and deform and his big eyebrows push the boundaries of his forehead. Mitzi is gentler all around with altogether fewer lines on her face. The combination of her large sleepy eyes and pencil line brow looked a little sad and a little condescending to me when I began working out her design - ultimately those aspects became incorporated into her personality.
I discuss expression drawing in more detail here (click the image for the link):
- Pose rendering is another one of those things for which observational/gesture drawing comes in handy. Even if you’re essentially scribbling stick figures, you can get a handle on natural looking, communicative poses this way. Stick figure poses make excellent guidelines for plotting out full fledged character drawings too.
Look for the line of action. It’ll be easiest to identify in poses with motions, gestures and moods that are immediately decipherable. When you’ve learned to spot it, you can start reverse engineering your own poses around it.
- Additional resources - here are some related things about drawing poses and constructing characters (click the images for the links).
Lastly…
- Tortured rumination about lack of ability/style/progress is a near universal state of creative affairs. Every artist I have known and worked with falls somewhere on a spectrum between frustration in perpetuity and a shade of fierce contrition Arthur Dimmesdale would be proud of. So, next time you find yourself constructing a scourge out of all those crusty acrylic brushes you failed to clean properly, you loathsome, deluded hack, you, at least remember you’re not alone in feeling that way. When it’s not crushing the will to live out of you, the device does have its uses - it keeps you self-critical and locked in working to improve mode. If we were all quite satisfied with our output, I suppose we’d be out of reasons to try harder next time.
When you need some reassurance, compare old work to new. Evolution is gradual and difficult to perceive if you’re narrowed in on the nearest data point, but if you’ve been steadily working on characters for a few months or a year, you’ll likely see a favorable difference between points A and B.
Most of all, don’t dwell on achieving some sort of endgame in which you’re finally there as a character artist. There’s no such place - wherever you are, there is somewhere else. It’s a moving goal post. Your energy will be better spent just enjoying the process…and that much will show in the results.
A little expression test I made in flip book on my phone, most of it was drawn with my finger, but I latter got a small stylist to finish it up.
I’m probably going to post more animation test in the future on here, but this is the first :)
Facial study
Expression study on myself
Mood of the week. Expression study 1hr30 Ref from Pinterest and character from my own story #art #artist #referencestudy #facestudy #expressionstudy #expression #girl #parrot #instaartist #instaart #illustration #digitalart #digitalillustration #drawing #originalcharacter https://www.instagram.com/p/CXFtlxxvXtx/?utm_medium=tumblr
this is a canon scene it’s true i was there
Day 31: Slice (feat. last year’s last inktober for comparison)
And that concludes this year’s inktober! This month actually went by faster than I expected, so I was surprised that Halloween is already here.
I hope everyone has a nice and safe Halloween! 🎃 But even if you don’t celebrate, I hope you have a good Wednesday 👋
"Fotos de mis Ojos" Los ven? Quien los encuentra?
Un Sábado Por la mañana, estaba haciendo fotografías con mi lente macro. Cuando se me ocurrió que tal vez utilizando diferentes tecnologías mediante aplicaciones o distintos software, una fotografía podría transformarse en un una “Obra de Arte”. Ya de por sí, sabemos que la Fotografía es un Arte., pero añadirle tecnología podría cambiar la forma de observar una foto.
Bueno, en este espacio, voy a presentarles esa investigación. Una forma de Experimentar en dos de los temas que me fascinan hoy en Día: La Fotografía y la Tecnología. Las Apps y su gran desarrollo. A mi demás esta decirles que Apple me tiene cautivada desde hace ya unos años.
Utilizare la Fotografía como base para introducirle cambios a las imágenes para convertirlas en “Pinturas”. Bueno, a ver como me va..
"Dejen sus opiniones, que es lo mejor que a un Artista le pueda suceder" "Dedico este trabajo al Placer de la Expresión mediante el Arte"
Fiorella / fioche
Here's a quick sketch i did on a notebook, hope you like it! 🐉🐲
Ps. Go check my Instagram account : sparse_note_2 for other sketches and art!
The plans don’t bring good things since you try to act, express yourself and the feeling of been yourself will be always more attractive then living with your projections of the future or overloaded chasing past wishes. Accept that you changed and the world changed, don’t be attached, live here and now isn’t that you should forget your past or living without a goal, just means you should do what you want to do now and if you don’t have time for exemple thing like who will make my dreams true in my place? No one, people will join you in this journey for a while as friends, family, partners but just you can cross your path and just planing to go without moving. The concept of movement mostly confuses people, most of my biggest journeys was in my bed just allowing me to feel what I am supposed to feel don’t matter if it’s happiness from a promotion at the work or I am feeling loneliness, the act of allowing me to feel move me closer to the balance. #nikon #nikonphotography #newplaces #bridge #lights #people #dance #expression https://www.instagram.com/p/Clw7nIjonYC/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
Project researches are incoming haha
For now my project’s name is “Exit” but i’m working on his design so it’s coming soon too ^^
Here are some posing of our team work :) i’ve made the concepts/chara design, 2 other team mate made the modelisation (maya 2017/ Zbrush) and we’ve made the rig, blendshape and skinning and one of them with a little bit of my help made the textures. (But they’re not applied yet on those arnold renderview)
I’m just sharing with you some actual work of the current project. 1 week and a half left… Stressed but we’re gonna make it.
And here is one tumblr of a member of my team : DaveCave.tumblr.com
I’ve made some emotional face studies again. Reasons 1 because i need it for my team work and reasons 2 because I really like it haha. :3
This is the following pictures for my team work ^^
I did so many other studies of those hahaha
Some studies and facial posing i did no long ago! :P
Departed... #fish #fishingtime #fishinglife #beachlife #deadfish #insta #departed #instadailypic #instafish #expression #expressionism #mahabalipuram #mamallapuram #chennai (at Mahabalipuram Beach)
A bolboreta ..
.. A shiny flurry groovy soul wish you all have a lovely day ! :)
