My advice would to be give it a really striking silhouette, so that you can still tell what character it is even when there’s just black, so giving your characters really exaggerating features, I mean look at the family guy characters, none of them have boring designs but they’re all really fun to look at.
@@Isla.M.W my favorite example of this is slim-fitting tops with really big pants or slim-fitting bottoms with a really puffy jacket it's used pretty often, so it's not as distinct as a silhouette like Peter Griffin's, but it's still a good way to add character to a design imo edit: changed phrasing for clarity
A clarification for everyone: this artist is a character designer/concept artist and animator. If you are NOT planning to use the character for animation or something else you'll have to draw 10 million times, accessories are perfectly acceptable. Complex graphics are fun. If you're an illustrator you probably don't need to take this advice super hardcore! Keep the little embroidery stitches and tattoo details! BUT, if this character needs to very repeatable, that is a time when this mini-tutorial will apply. Hope this helps y'all
also even if youre repeating it alot in many poses and stuff, if your style or the material youre making it for requires a complex designs thats okay too, there's no one way to make art but you should learn these sort of "art rules" as guidelines cuz they help you do what you wanna do with awareness and balance and help you execute it right or find a better way to execute it that you wouldnt have thought of otherwise.
And even if you are going to use it for animation, it depends A LOT of your style and type of animation. This is way too cartoonish, there are toons of animation styles
It aslo depends on the length of the animation, as shorter animations will not take as much time to make anyway than a whole show. So, if you're just making animations for a game or an animation meme then very detailed character aren't as much of an inconvenience as you won't have to work as much on that animation, one great example being the game Twisted Wonderland which has alot of animated sprites that each character has along with npcs and most of the designs are very detailed (especially the dorm uniforms, some like the Pomefiore outfit and the Savanaclaw outfit are very detailed and sometimes trips me up even when just drawing them once yet I still decided to have many ocs in those 2 specifically and idk why I did that because it makes drawing all my ocs kinda annoying if we ignore my having like 12 or more ocs)
@@dorf7219 Have you seen how some characters deform their figures in JoJo during certain battles? There's a tonne of it in Part 6, also just the movement of each Stand, there's little you can pull from for something like Weather Report (a cloud turning into a humanoid robot and vice versa, I doubt there's much reference material about that for the animators).
@@Dynamo33 Compared to “simpler” styles (ex. gurren lagann, one piece), Jojo is still a relatively static show (understandably. It’s a hellish style to animate lol). I think Jojo does a really good job with sound and key poses/acting to keep it interesting to watch and action packed even with less frames 👍👍 they just use different techniques than other sakuga sequences
I always get so excited when a character just has glasses because they need them. So often it’s just used for character design to show a nerd but like,, I just can’t see. It doesn’t say anything about my personality. One of the reasons I was so excited about Mirabelle in Encanto and Willow from the owl house
Thus is the reason a lot of cartoon pilots are GORGEOUS but the series designs are aways less cooler (looking at you SU, like honestly Rebecca's artstyle is sooo beautiful I wish I could replicate their style)
I'm not sure Steven universe was all that pretty in the beginning. Steven looked like a turtle, his dad looked like a hot dog, and pearls head shape changed every 2 seconds. The artstyle definitely got more stable, consistent, and just prettier as the series moved on. Maybe I just don't understand what you're saying though.
@myapatterson3505 They're talking about the original youtube pilot compared to the actual show. Major design changes and visual differences. The show's artsyle was also just never that consistently to begin with. I agree some of the designs were better after season 1 when it simplified a bit more, but they also started being really incoaisnt with colors and character heights. Lapis' color pallette and Steven, Connie, and Peridot's height shifts are all infamous examples in the fandom
As much as I do love the look of both characters I feel like simplifying the characters look in clothing design kind of kills a whole character's personality, and kind of makes them look more or less interesting. I mean you can always make a simplify character with a lot of designs and accessories in different type of clothing that make them look interesting but maybe it's just the way it was drawn.
i agree! i know certain designs have to be simplified for animation, but i would much rather animation take longer than have a boring character. this character felt so dynamic in the first drawing and in the second she becomes less memorable to me.
Tbf when animating for a tv series or show animators are not going to have a lot of time for details and such, characters are going to move a whole lot, which is why when designing characters for things like that it has to be a lot simpler. Even if they do want to take longer to have more details i dont think the producers would want it. I do agree tho if its just for the sake of designing characters and stuff. It has a lot more personality showing. And after all, it's SIMPLIFYING they're not saying it is the better version
Well, unless you have a big enough budget to have artists draw a bunch of detailed characters then the simplified look is better and gets the point across anyway. 🤷♂️
@@tuvalu636 strong present bottom lip creates a much more defined look that Reed is the character being south Asian, someone would most likely read her as being arab. The second creates a must softer look on the lips, reading more as east Asian.
These are 2 vastly different characters. The top is an older, cool, confident woman. Laid back and self assured. The bottom one is younger and optimistic. Her tomboyish style leads more to her coolness rather than her own self eestem which she is young and still coming into
i understand the simplification thing, but after reading these comments, i realise the character's face didn't need to be changed so much - the white hat, glasses and bottom lip could've stayed in a simpler form instead of being replaced or removed... the rest is streamlined well without transforming the overall style
I heard someone say “My advice to comic creators is to cut more corners. No, more than that. No, more than that” Obviously though, it’s very dependent on your schedule, style, priorities, medium, etc. There’s also ways to cut corners without taking away the details you love. I know custom brushes are a big one
Plus comics usually have special artworks that have the MCs drawn in all their glory. Like cover art, anniversary art etc. they can draw characters as detailed as they want for those one off drawings.
I think there's an important distinction that went unmentioned in this vid - simplifying in animation is necessary IF you have a deadline. If you're just doing it as a hobby/passion project, go nuts and do whatever you want, add as many details as you see fit and don't feel the need to restrict yourself if you don't want. I think a lot of aspiring animators get the wrong idea from vids like this and think they can't stay true to their hearts/what inspires them because they get this notion that pumping out episodes is more important than taking their vision one step at a time to an appreciative audience.
I remember reading this manhwa that have this BEAUTIFUL AND GORGEOUS AND JUST BREATHTAKING ART! I'd expect one panel would take 20 hours or more and they upload WEEKLY??????? It's amazing really.
It's likely they either stock up so they're ~10-20 chapters ahead of release and/or have a team working on specific parts like lining and coloring. Definitely makes the workload easier
Yeah, manga & comic artists usually work in teams if it's professional, because high- production weekly upload is brutal. Many mangakas are severely overworked though, in fact reports of suicide among manga artists has gone up significantly in the last decade. It's pretty sad
@@Lolamy well yeah but thats not the point of the video. the POINT was the simplify the design while keeping the characters essence. which... was. not successful. "concept to final" is different from "simplifying the finalized design"
Yeah the first design looks like a hip hop girl but the second one literally looks like a skater girl... And they even remove the glass which is definitely an important detail to the character. The different lips shape also ruined her original design and personality
This is honestly the hardest thing. Finding the balance betweem this is so hard and I've had moments in my art where it's far too complicated and times it's way too simple to tell a good story.
I always find it funny that western animation is like “simplify simplify simplify!!” And anime is just like “Here’s a million little details we have to animate and don’t forget all the sparkles in the eyes and complex shading”
Western animation usually uses more gestures, expressions and having correct lip sync, in which the simplification is almost necessary all things considered, while the Japanese animation usually budgets on those as much as they can to focus on said details, sparkles etc.(and well, action/sakuga, depending on the anime) It really just comes down to preference of having a prettier picture but less animation on it and vice versa
Meanwhile I'm watching Naruto thinking "wow some of these scenes are literally slideshows with no animation" and then you finally see the FPS go up for the big fights
I can't say I agree, taking away the lips, glasses, and the clothes just reads as whole different character. I actually thought they were sisters, her daughter, or a younger version of herself. Details are important in a TV show and can convey a lot even through the screen. It's just very tedious.
I don't think you really get it. In animation you are going to have to draw that character every single frame..which Is going to be a lot , that includes the details and everything. On top of that but all of that is going to have to meet a deadline. However I think this is just one example, and probably not the best one but it's straight to the point. I do get where you are coming from though. You can have an interesting character with minimal details and there are a lot of ways that could have been done for the top character
@@weirddd469Nah you’re 100% right dude the commenter above doesn’t know what they’re talking about and missed the point. Also have they never seen character iteration before like yeah characters go through a TON of changes and will not look the exact same after being simplified or ready for animation.
"tedious" is not the right word. "expensive" is. it's "tedious" if it's just a hobby or a personal project. in that case, do whatever makes you happy, doesn't matter how long it takes or how bad the result is. but a professional (or aspiring professional) needs to make consistent, _complete_ high-quality projects on a timescale they can plan and budget for. while it might not speak to your soul or anything, it is _very_ good advice, and it's how things actually get done.
I know it’s for animation but they don’t really have that much in common. I still live for the animation design but I would love it if they incorporated more of the og into the second one.this comment wasn’t meant to be “hate” I just wanted to say I can’t see those characters being the same person.
Y’all, these aren’t some strict rules that everyone _has_ to follow. If you want to make your character extremely detailed and spend a long time animating them, you can.
@@amanbirbthe4th967 So, you're saying that wealth inequality is tangentially causing art quality to decline? I'd buy that. 10 hrs should get paid for 10 hrs work
Some of these choices are fine, but some of them are a clear gap in skills. Her head covering being simplified to a baseball cap, eliminating the glasses, and taking her facial features into Kim Possible territory are all sacrifices to the character’s ethnicity, culture, and ability. I can see the clear inspo of 90s and 00s cartoons like the Proud Family here, but those characters were simple without being *whitened*. Can you imagine if this character had microbraids instead of pin-straight hair? Would that be okay to “simplify?” This is part of why companies have chosen to pivot from hand-animating stuff and toward computer assisted stuff. It’s faster, and you can maintain more details. But *which* details that get cut… matter a lot.
hate to break it to you but.. characters change ethnicity/race a lot in the concepting stage, this might be a hard pill to swallow but.. some characters become whiter, some do the opposite.
Nah, not an excuse. I see where the original commentator was coming from but that's still not a reason that certain aspects of this character were taken out to make it more 'simplified'. @@Lolamy
Honestly I wouldn’t mind waiting longer for more detailed characters if animators needed (with proper compensation as well). I feel like it would be amazing.
see this is why insert show character redesign usualy flops for me. They tend to make the character way harder to draw by treating it as a stagnit peice instead of a moving being that has to be drawn a thousand times.
@@LolamyCreating concepts for a character design is something completely different from simplifying the finalized character design you have, so you can actually animate it into a show.
@Lolamy this isnt a concept tho, its a finished design that got simplified. a character's race and ethnicity is pretty important to their identity, culture and personality. for example, say you give the final product to the director who very explicitly said the character is filipino and you just say "oh, it was too complex for me, so i made her mexican. just how it is." see how that sounds???
Due to the change of the graphic on her shirt, the second one tells me more about her than the first. I couldn't have known that she's an anarchist with the first design, which means that the second one actually tells me more about her personality and beliefs.
I'm doing a comic but when I try to simplify my stile like less details, less folds, more geometrical and unrealistic anatomy, but I always end up doing details because the style looks ugly and static
Comics are different, you're drawing a bunch but each frame is it's own illustration. The difficult thing about detailed animated characters it's drawing the character multiple times for a single action
Oh believe me. A full comic of 20 pages can only be a 1 min animation in terms of drawings. Then you'll really get confused with too many bumps and unnecessary details.
I know what you mean, it just takes practice. Ask yourself what you need to tell your story, write a character description, and then eliminate the rest. I know from experience that it is easier said than done but you just have to keep working in it.
I like doing simple/simplifed designs for OCS that are more lore based, and then have complex OCS that barely have any lore! Ones w/lore needs to be doodled a lot for storytelling; good to use both ways of character designing for different uses outside of animating 💯 loved this video 💗
That’s also why characters who aren’t in a show very much, have more intricate designs. Cuz they only need to be redrawn like a hundred times, which for a professional animated show is not a lot
I would suggest going with the manhwa method. Which is to create detailed 3d models of all the characters once, and then for every time you use the character just pose it how you need it then trace it on your drawing app. You get both speed and details. The only thing is the initial time cost of making a detailed 3d model.
I think simplification is a great tool for character designs. Felix the Cat, Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, all of these designs are relatively basic, and are insanely iconic. The problem is that lots of shows tend to go overboard on simplicity in their style(MLP and Bluey come to mind as they literally recycle the same bases endlessly) and don't really take advantage of the fact that simpler designs allow for characters to be animated better.
I'd actually argue against the argument that Bluey or MLP is oversimplified, or rather, they ARE but it's done so well that's part of the show's BRAND, and intentionally part of the style of the show. Makes anything with that style instantly recognizable; they did extreme simplification WELL, mostly because nothing else shares that base style. If I show a pony or dog from either show, my dad can probably guess in it's most basic form it's "that pony show" or "the Blue dog show". Counter this with shows like Steven Universe, Owl House, Star VS, Thundercats Roar, Gravity Falls, etc, where the simplification of the characters are done to the point where it can be hard to distinguish between different SHOWS. If I show my dad any of those 2010 CalArts style shows, he might not be able to tell who belongs where, or even name part of the show any of them are from. We know because we're familiar with the characters, but for major brand identity it can be harder to distinguish. Everyone can say "it's a Mickey" or "that's the Mario guy" because there's something majorly distinguishing about them. Also they advertise like hell so
@FangyDoesArt that's understandable. I also want more diversity in art styles, but that also includes more diversity in the designs for each show. Unique designs with unique silhouettes and body types and what have you. I am trying to become a character designer/artist, and I'm just trying to learn rn. My tastes might be a bit biased and skewed towards golden age and 90s-2000s cartoons, even if there's new shows I enjoy tf out of(Over the Garden Wall, Lackadaisy, Murder Drones, TADC), but yeah. For better or worse, everyone will know when someone's trying to draw like something from MLP or Bluey. Hell, as a longtime fan of Sonic, there tends to be a lot of consistency in the designs, given how they're all modeled off of rubberhose cartoons and DBZ era Akira Toriyama, at least in the modern era.
This is simplification done wrong. I simplified my character by removing the hair gradient and glasses because it was hard for me to draw those a bunch of times. BUT I COULD STILL RECOGNIZE THE CHARACTER, the hair shape, body shape, small details, clothing style, and accessories were all the same. There is no problem with simplifying a character, just don't make it dull!
I honestly love simplifying my characters juuust enough to strike that balance between simple but unique. Even if you don't use the simplified version, it's great practice for learning to quickly convey a character's most important traits.
I feel like maybe the face shape should be more square-y in the simplified version to fully be able to recognise the character as the same one as the one above Great tut tho (*´ω｀*)
That’s why character sheets and close-ups in comics can be detailed but everything else is simplified. My most designed OC looks like he’s wearing an orange shirt with long, grey sleeves but the sleeves have a sweater/chain pattern and somewhere on his shirt (evolving design) is a grey fleur de lis- for aesthetic and royal symbolism if I want to go down that road.
Draw illustrations however you like but I know for a fact you wouldn’t want to animate a character with lots of little details like that with like 10 hours of screen time that would be like 432,000 drawings if it’s 12 fps
Tbh the first design is so much more visually appealing and interesting for the character. Makes her look like an actual character instead of your average "cocky tomboy stereotype" Edit: yall can chill in the replies, i know what animating is like; espicially for large projects. I was just pointing out from a character design standpoint that tye first one has much more depth compared to the second lmfao.
Yes but you have to remind yourself that this person is a professional character designer, and mainly does characters for animations, she creates them more simple because if they are too complex, it’s a pain when you animate.
my character design teacher told me to cut the glasses on my character for my short film smh man. i mean i get why but it told so much more about the character's personality imo
Ngl I like making my characters complex because I don't want my drawing to feel to easy when I'm drawing it, that and it's just rewarding seeing the final product
Don't put more work on yourself than you can handle, but no one ever HAS to simplify any design, and simplifying isn't always good. In my opinion, these two designs look like totally different people with different vibes and ethnicities. Most designs are simplified simply for two reasons: cost and effort. If you want to put the heart and effort (and budget if that applies) into your work, do it. Simple is not always better it depends on your *intent* with your art and what medium you're using. If it's comics, hand drawn animation, 3d models, anime, western cartoons, videogames, they all have different strengths and limitations. *Do what works for you.*
I wear glasses because my vision is not great and I don't really think it's a big deal in this scenario; heck, I even do it myself. Contact lenses are a thing and when characters happen to have to wear them because of their imperfect sight then I think that's totally cool too! This could (mayhaps) be the case for this character. Either way though I understand where you're coming from
I feel this is more of a style choice than anything. Both designs are pretty good. The bottom one looks like a 70's Hanna Barbara cartoon while the top one (while there's no style I can compare it to) looks just as good but just with a bit more detail to it. There's nothing wrong with adding details to character designs, just as long as it's not overwhelming. I mean for real, Disney's renaissance movies had a lot of details to their characters and they certainly don't look bad in the slightest. If animators, designers, or illustrators wants to keep things somewhat simple, that's fine. But making things a bit more detailed doesn't make it a bad thing. I am someone who has drawn characters my whole life who still keeps on improving my creations because I know I can do better and won't rest till it resembles the animations that's influenced me into drawing in the first place. For anyone who's reading this, don't be afraid to push yourself, you can do better than you think you can, don't be discouraged with adding details, as long as it's not overbearing on the eyes or something that's gonna be stressful to draw a second time.
this isn't ABOUT THE CHARACTERS LOOKING GOOD/BAD, this is about animation, you need to simplify characters in tv animation because otherwise it's hell to work with.
@@Lolamy "because it's hell to work with", if an animator is that overwhelmed with adding a bit of detail to their characters then maybe they shouldn't go into that profession in the first place. Yes, there's not as great of a budget in animated television programs as full length animated movies, but that doesn't mean details play a factor into that. Take Aladdin as an example, that's a franchise that's gotten a theatrical film, one television movie pilot along with the tv show, and a direct to video movie. While each one as different budgets from one another, they all still include as much detail to the character's features as what was originally presented to us. Even with something that's not based on a movie like Gargoyles, that's a show with a great amount of details to the show. Again, the uploader is getting details and style art preferences mixed up with eachother. If your art is simple, that's fine, but it's also okay for an animator/art designer to have details to their work.
One thing to note is that not all character design follow the same rules and conventions. For example, a hand drawn animated character benefits from being "constructed" from three dimensional volumes. A tiny sidescroller game character puts more emphasis on colors, shape and silhouette. A typical anime character conveys personality through hair detail and accessories, since they won't be moving that much.
@@RACOONAFIED that's great but unless you're an animator actually working for a company it doesn't matter. simple animation is better for tv shows and that's just the objective truth.
This just seems like such a drastic style change tho 😭 I spent so much time learning anatomy and how to draw it realistically. I never felt comfortable with making cartoony proportions or simplified shapes since I spent so much time studying.. When I see something purposefully cartoony my brain will just automatically knit-pick the obvious simplifications.. 😅 I actually want to fix this! I wanna be more fluid with my art but I’m trying to each my mind to be okay with imperfections.. :’)
You can draw however you want! You don't have at draw super simple if you don't want to. This seems more like character design practice and animation practice.
so basically animation character design is like logo design, taking just enough detail for it to be simple yet not too much so it can be read and understood. as well as having it be unique and recognizable
