Character Design: Silhouettes (Patreon)

Alright finally, we're getting to silhouettes. 

So, why consider silhouettes when designing a character?

It's very easy to tell people apart when you're making a character and are going to fill in or show all the details. In a finished piece, you can usually see exactly whose who with notable features, colors, and a bit of knowledge of the characters.

But what do you do when you're first setting out to make a character, and know that you aren't going to want to do only nice, neat, finished pieces?

That's where visual identity being tied to shapes comes in very handy.

Here is a fully finished picture I did for my DnD group. It's easy to see who's who, mostly because everyone's a different race, but also because of the colors and labels. Bam, no confusion.

Nice finished pieces like this are usually good enough to get across the character. But what if you want to translate that to some quicker, lower-effort posting?

Heres is a quick doodle I had done after a session involving Seeker

This is a middle-tier piece for effort in terms of my quick after-session memorable moments doodles. But, despite Seeker being distinctly less detailed, his main features are there.

This picture shows what notable features Seeker and Aureth have when I draw them. Seeker obviously is easily identifiable as the only orc in our party once you can see his tusks, but his shape is also different.

His basic silhouette is similar to Aureth, shown here:

Part of the similarity is down to how I draw the little fly strands of hair off the brow, but even then the ears+hair of Aureth are different enough to differentiate them.

Aureth is obviously denoted pretty clearly by her scars, no matter how messy my doodles get. However, I know that when I draw her, there is a very short list of things I need to hit in order to denote that the blob over there is Aureth.

Below is a doodle I hashed out on MS Paint mid-session, and despite me spending a hot 5 minutes on it (And forgetting Aureths previously mentioned scars geez me) every character is relatively recognizable upon first glance:

It also means for memeing your campaign things become very streamlined for identifying whose who

Obviously, silhouettes being important to my oscillating styles is very much a specific feature of how I create, however taking the time to examine a characters profile and its basic design elements is a fun character design exercise and helps pinpoint exactly what it is about a character is important to their visual impact.