CHARACTER DESIGN 101 - My process and things to keep in mind! 

Tired it, was confusing af

happens to the best of us

Hell yeah🦖

I never did. My thing was always dragons because I am a mythology guy. I have a lot of dragon OCs. Mostly eastern ones because they feel more mystical.

@@alvenkaiser4549no no it was a dino

Noice

Haven't heard someone say "skrunkly" (excluding myself) for a WHILE

@@Asm0d3u5 I just rewatched it and realized it was actually "scrungle" but y'know, sentiment remains

Why is that a popular word

@@mrpickles-hb6zx It's funny

What kind of Hispanic is that?

Darkest Dungeon is a great example of the complete _opposite_ philosophy. Even the most badass and well-off characters in that world look _miserable_ to us. And the ones that are meant to look awful are downright depressing or terrifying.

That makes me think of Pseudo from Clash: Artifacts of Chaos. And i guess by extent Zenozoik and Zeno Clash at large. The setting is a bizarre world of sapient monsters and freaks with elements from Medieval paintings (like Hieronymus Bosch's) and prehistory, which partially shows in how the Zenos dress. They take all manner of knick-knacks, fabrics and accessories that they seem to like the look of, and slap it onto themselves. However silly the clothing and paintjobs may look, the Zenos look all the more interesting for it. There's characters that seem to wear shirts made out of woven-together rags, a top or bra made out of two antler-looking bone pieces mixed with trousers that have one tight leg and one baggy leg, belt accessories with a painted angry red face or a metal goofy-faced brass plate over the groin, a strange metal belt consisting of three iron structures that looks like a fidget spinner, a top decorated with spine pieces, and in the case of a cow-headed character, a hood made out of a human's face skin. The character Pseudo stands out for just how *little* he wears. Baggy trousers, long leather strips holding up his trousers connected to his upper arms, and leather footwear that looks to be somewhere between sandals and thigh-length socks. The only other form of style he wears are two areas of facepaint, in a traffic gridding or chess board pattern. Of course, the rest of his design helps in being striking. He's fuppin' bizarre.

I misread that as WWI and I nearly infodumped 😭

This may sound like complete Bs. But even if you can't draw you can come up with amazing character designs. You just need to capture the thought and translate it.

@@The_Unholy_Deathslinger78 second that, just describing a good character is character designing in itself, lol

Something you could do if you’re working traditionally is to create a “coloring book”. Do a clean line drawing of your character, scan it, and print out several copies of your lineart. Then you can experiment with a bunch of different colors until you find a palette you like. You can also make color maps like the one I made on a separate piece of paper, without the context of character.

fr fr

Please 🥺🙏🏻 his rendering style it's so unique i would love to learn how to render colors like that with other ones to make colors to combine very well

Good luck with your creative endeavors, friend!

Maybe the outlandishness could serve a narrative purpose, idk the contrast could be cook

my guess is it's easier on the eyes after long hours of staring at a screen, seeing as the white is a lot more bright. also, it can help colors pop more as the neutrality helps you see the color values

I don’t always tone the sheet grey, but I often do with character sheets like this one for the reason @el1xer mentioned. Using a neutral tone in the background helps you get a better perception of value in your character design.

If I'm planning on eventually drawing a background, I've started putting in the main color of the background in first so that I can visualize how to contrast the character against the background in color and tone. It also could hypothetically remind me of what color I need to shade or highlight with but I usually forget this.

It depends! Some clients will have things like mood boards already when they commission you, other times it will be up to you to come up with those ideas. Creating a mood board for your client and showing it to them before you start sketching will help you both get on the same page about what the client wants and what you can give them.

It all comes back to that magic word: intent. What are you doing with your character? Is it a vampire queen set in a dark, gothic setting? In that case, perhaps a limited palette of dark, desaturated colors would work well for you. Are you designing a fae warrior riding a magic axolotl? Maybe in that case you’ll want a much wider range of colors that are saturated and vibrant

Yep! Sasha was known as “Princess Crocodile” when she worked for SPOAR because of how much time she spent with Lockjaw

Nothing is “necessary”, only what is needed for the job. If you’re designing a character for an animation, you’ll need as many different angles of the character as the animators would need to draw the character in. If you’re designing a character for a single, one-off illustration, you may not need to do a turnaround at all. I like doing two point turnaround as a way to help me get a better understanding of my character’s three dimensional form. That way I can pose the character in multiple different ways and have an informed perspective of what certain parts of the character would look like from certain angles. I don’t really need more than a front and back to do that.