Some characters leave a lifetime impression on the viewer. Before the character moves or speaks, its design and concept art narrate a story by creating a particular environment or vision. Some became famous through simple illustration, or they had to put in much effort to get the audience’s attention.
Building a character is not easy. You might find it simple while just watching them, but creating characters that will forever leave a positive mark on viewers takes a lot of effort. Legendary characters like Mickey Mouse or Mr. Bean have their behind-the-scenes stories, and it takes a lot of hard work to gain such success. They were never easy to create.
Much time and determination are required to streamline a character and make it look flawless. Structuring characters can be very complicated—you can take Final Fantasy (1987) and its comprehensive universe as an example. Can you imagine what it took to create this character and the whole scenario?
In this blog, we have explained what character design is, crucial character design tips and fundamental principles.
What Is Character Design?
Character design involves creating and picturing a persona that fits a particular visual story. This creative procedure applies to on-screen media such as cartoons, films, and video games. Still, it also spreads to print media, including Mangas, comic books, illustrated children’s literature, and graphic novels.
Creating characters is much more than looks and appearance. It incorporates everything about design, the principles, the theory, and, most crucially, its execution.
Artists must properly comprehend character design to enhance technical skills and develop artistic styles for progression. The more extraordinary character means creating the perfect personality, attitude, and relatability.
6 Useful Tips For Character Design
As we move on to the fundamentals of character idea creation, you’ll see that the most crucial elements of cool character designs are personality, story-telling, and memorability.
Let’s now explore six helpful tips to get you started on your character-building journey.
1. Start with Research
Before initiating any creative content endeavor, it is vital to recognize the consequence of preliminary setup as the early step in creative progression. This stage permits the development of a thoughtful character essence, challenging the flow of innovative ideas. As an alternative to inactively browsing the internet, it is convincing to participate in risky thinking to analyze the features beneficial to the success of certain characters.
Learn character designs and principles of animation from various sources to let one separate and escalate precise alluring characteristics. Increasing your visual library through revelation to numerous foundations improves your volume for creative encouragement.
You can get inspiration from your daily life, for example, family members, friends, famous figures, and many influential characters around you. Their walking gestures, styles, way of talking or expressing themselves, body language, and more. This intense research will give various character design ideas to your mind and help you create your unique characters all the time.
2. Remove Yourself from References
Next, it is essential to step back from all your research and focus on mastering character animation. This will help you avoid the same mistakes other character designers make.
Some professionals avoid the concept of a design board to maintain the influence of the creative process. Remember, your references from memory may trigger the maximum amount of creativity.
Focusing on prompt incentives instead of the external environment is often domineering in design. To enhance creativity, sometimes creators repeat other artists’ ideas, which affects their character design. Although collaboration is essential in designing, self-examining may lead you to a unique persona.
3. Understand The Consumer
Good character designs cannot be conceived easily. The end user eventually has their own set of requirements. Though it may seem that the client commands the specifications, they would not create a product without market research.
Moreover, a product without focusing on clients’ requirements would not be efficient. The answer to how to draw your character is that there are many angles to consider. Remember, the storyline and the character’s primary goal must be designed. Is it for an animated series? A comedy character? A manga? A children’s book? Or is it for creating 3D characters for AAA Games?
Besides all this information, you must know the context in which your character will be used and its distribution channel. The creator should see the number of details and the core features needed to design a character.
If talking about how to design a cartoon character, you should comprehend the difference between Cartoon Network and Disney characters and the level of specifications required to create each character.
4. The Importance of the Environment
When creating a character, be mindful of the importance of the environment. Anticipate the world your character will inhabit. If made appropriately, it would be an excellent illustration and a completely living individual who will impact the viewer’s mind.
The environment in which your character will breathe supports you in strengthening the acceptability of your creation and gives a foundation to your character design.
5. What’s Your Character’s Backstory?
While focusing on the character design tips, remember that your characters existed before you created them. Your creation must have inspiration from real life and a backstory.
Before taking into account how to make good character designs, you must consider where this character comes from, what life-changing events happened in their past, how these events impacted your character, who their friends and family are, where they reside, what their heritage is, and their role in society.
6. Give the Character a Fleshed-Out Personality
How to improve character design? This question should always be asked to create something memorable, as it will be an essential part of the story’s narration. Though advanced drawing techniques are an enormous help when creating a character, you can’t rely only on them.
Remember, people get attached to personalities more than the background, environment, or other story aspects. Your design should reflect an understandable and attractive personality to make people feel connected. In the end, it’s the character that gets the fame, not the story or the environment.
Character Core Design Principles
Now that you know the useful tips on how to make a good character design, it’s time to look into the principles of character design.
1. Stick to a Color Palette
You might like to introduce most colors to make your character look vibrant and memorable. But this is a wrong approach. Our minds need to sync to connect with anything.
You must make your selections according to the character’s personality. This will help you create more genuine and distinctive characters. Too many colors will confuse your viewers. Working on three or four primary colors for each character is better. This will give your characters a unique identity.
2. Choose Distinctive Shapes
Creating your own unique characters is exciting. You can give your characters the shape you like and create their style. You can choose from human-type or animal-like creatures or build your imagination to suit your character best. The fantasy world gives you tons of freedom.
3. Exaggerate Key Features
While talking about your favorite characters, you must have noticed that they had something extra special that made you remember them.
For example, Popeye with his giant muscles or Jhonny Bravo with his broad chest, excessively high hair, and huge glasses. These exaggerated features make your characters stand out and different from others. So, yes, you can enjoy the freedom of creating something unique and memorable.
4. Design with Your Unique Style
Everyone has a different style of narrating the same story. So do you. Every design might look old, but your unique style will make it distinct and outstanding. Your experiences, observations, and how you deliver your message will make your style dissimilar from others.
You can always get inspiration from around you, but producing your way is essential. This is how you will create something unique by adding your style.
5. Concentrate on Facial Expressions
They say, ” Your facial expression says it all.” Your facial features express your inner side, emotions, and feelings. When creating 2D or 3D characters, you must focus on their facial expressions, as they will give them a different personality. This will provide viewers with a connection with your character.
6. Be Influenced by Their Backstory
It is best to have a healthy backstory to create the character’s personality. This will help you incorporate your character into a detailed story. The facial expressions and clothes they wore on the first page will create an impact and give constant life to your story.
7. Make Sure You Can Repeat the Design
When considering character development beyond one drawing, such as for a complete comic book story or a video game, finding the skill to create each character’s design constantly becomes famous.
Famous illustrators and animators frequently find themselves re-forming their formations numerous times for new-fangled stories, feature-length films, and TV productions. When designing your character for the first time, it is best to create numerous key poses. These sketches can be reused later.
8. When in Doubt, Keep It Simple
If you are unsure or have doubts about how to design characters, it is preferable to keep your character as simple as possible, stick with the basic concepts, and use minimum colors, shapes, etc.
The simpler your design, the easier it will be to replicate it, and you will not get confused by jumbling everything together. Once you get comfortable with your character, you can add more variations.
9. Shape Theory
Focus on shape theory, as it plays a vital role in your character’s body movement. Shapes have meanings; if we look at them closely, circles and ovals have somewhat friendly looks, so they are most commonly used accordingly.
Similarly, square jaws, shoulders, and hands convey a sense of strength, balance, and discipline. Triangular shapes are considered the sharpest of all shapes. So, keeping shape theory in mind while creating your character will help it connect to the audience.
10. Clichés
Educational material can guide character formation, but it is imperative to avoid clichés and frequent character figures. When creating a character, struggle to discover unique behaviors that connect their personality to your sketching elegance.
11. Pose
To advance your character’s key poses, attempt rotating the character into a profile to grid for iconic motions and shapes. Research with stability and weight allocation, and shorten and scrutinize the outline unsympathetically for movement.
12. Hair, Clothes, And Accessories
Sketching digital hair with vector graphics can be stimulating, but it’s essential to extravagance it as a great, animated shape that matches the appeal and the story. Likewise, clothing and accessories should replicate the character’s personality and background to make them authentic and relevant.
13. Color Theory
Empathetic color psychology benefits character design. Dark colors are associated with antiheroes, whereas light colors signify heroes.
However, it’s okay to break down these clichés. Generate an acquainted color palette that accompanies your crucial color—there’s adequate distinction amongst colors. Reflect on the progress of the character’s color palette and story growth. Likewise, the character’s setting should be reflected when designing.
14. Sketch
When designing a character, begin with a rough sketch to skeleton the wide-ranging structure. Polish the project until you’re contented with the outcome and produce an added refined ultimate form.
Employ tools like Procreate for sketching. Reflect on discovering numerous differences in thumbnail size and apprehension of dissimilar angles to express the finest story. Sketch as many designs as possible without being too tricky, as loose sketches can be gutted up in the last step.
15. Finalize
Subsequently arranging the foundation, conclude your character’s particulars and design. A comprehensive sketch will make digital transformation or animation easier.
Design Your Dream Characters Today!
After learning the basics and fundamental principles, you must now know how to draw your own character. You can also communicate your idea with Anideos and partner up for the best character animation. We help companies create incredible character designs using top 3D sculpting software. Visit us now!
