character design process (Patreon)

Someone on the server had asked for feedback on a character design of theirs, this sort of stuff is difficult for me since it's such a broad subject and personal tastes and biases shape up what everyone likes to see in designs, so the idea of making a post about how I go to make characters has been in my head for a bit! So here we are. 

I tend to have some self imposed rules when making characters, I'll divide this post explaining said rules, those being:

-Simple sillouette
-Must be easy to draw, even for a kid
-Very limited colors
-Details and accesories go out the window, if I forget about a detail while drawing a character without reference I find it pointless and scrap that aspect of the design
-Has to be kinda funny in some way

• Sillouette

This is a pretty self explanatory one that's also a general good design rule, if you can make out an iconic design just by looking at it's blacked out sillouette you're good to go! You're able to recognize Goku's hair anywhere due to how unique of a shape it has.

A lot of my characters tend to have nonsensical hair for that reason alone, I think giving it fun shapes is a pretty easy way to make them stand out, after all you'd probably be looking at their faces most of the time, so your attention naturally goes to the top.

Here's some examples of this on my own work:

• Must be easy to draw

While reading the MegaMan Battle Network Official Complete Works book there was a little note on some of the early concept art that stuck out to me:

In my opinion this is such a simple yet genious rule to follow! I tend to have bias towards older media, specifically games, due to nostalgia and because I think older works have extremely solid designs. The limitations of the time forced the artists to get creative with what they could make, and the results were very iconic designs! A prime example of this in my opinion is Bomberman, the design philosophy of the games (both in art and gameplay) were geared to appeal to children, so they aimed for something cutesy and more playful instead of some of the wackier designs the character previously had, the outcome is something that anyone can draw without much issue and unique that it just sticks with you. I'm pissed that I can't ever come up with anything that good.

• Limited colors/Details and accessories

These kinda go hand in hand, I could've also thrown em alongside the previous point but I didn't want to make it super long.

Personally I try to keep these aspects to the minimum due to the main reason that, I want to make comics! So I'm going to have to keep drawing these characters over and over, the less time it takes me to draw the better workflow I can have.

Ages ago when I was still a kid I wanted to be an animator, so even before deciding to take art seriously I always had that in the back of my head, so this was just a design concept I kinda grew up with.

I wanted to make sure Krea's design could be simplified enough to the point where anyone could draw her without problem!

• Gotta be kinda funny

This is an entirely personal reason, but for some reason I end up having my "Yes! This is it!" moment when a sketch makes me chuckle. 

Characters that are cool are neat and all, but in my opinion designs that have some sort of dumb element to it really elevate it to me, once again probably thanks to the media I grew up with. An example that comes to mind is Astro Boy, he's really cute and cool! But him being able to pull out a turret out of his ass is so ridiculous I can't help but love it. In a piece of artwork Proto Man is shown off wearing sunglasses below his other sunglasses and I love that, it's a really stupid side to characters that makes them more endearing to me. Not to mention his ridiculous pompadour too... How does he fit that in the helmet??

Silly aspects are also something that can be considered in the writing process, characters are more than just their looks! For example Krea besides her cute appearance is not a nice person at all, so seeing people's surprise about that aspect of her when reading the comic was very funny.

• Putting it all into practice!

After all that explained I thankfully have some character that displays all of this pretty well! Her name is Misa and thankfully the process was archived so I can explain it pretty well.

I wanted to make a cat girl character, I love them but for some reason I never had one of my own, so I started out with something very basic:

It's cute! But that's all she has going on for now. She's bland and the only unique thing about her are the cat ears. maybe glasses?? But again nothing really outstanding about her

Round 2! I was staring at my cat to see what aspects were unique about her, that's when I noticed her giant whiskers, so I decided to add that into Misa. Her face is pretty small and the glasses are already covering part of her face, so I didn't want to put the whiskers on her face, so instead I just gave her very big eyelashes, it did the job at portraying the sillouette of whiskers and looked really dumb. I also changed her limbs to be more cat like, while I liked this version more there was still something lacking.... so onto a final revision!

I was thinking about how having such big eyelashes would probably feel heavy for the eyes, so now she's permanently squinting. Maybe she's squinting because of her bad eyesight? Maybe she's just angry and silently judging everyone? I don't know, but it sure did give her some personality! She's not just standing there looking pretty anymore, you can sense some of her attitude now. Since she looked ready to blow up if you poked her gears too much I shaped the end of her tail to look like a bomb fuse.

She also became a full on cat person! In her world there's more animal people than humans or hybrids between the two, so in order to be consistent with the already established rules of her setting she had to get the furry shot. 

This last point is why I have trouble giving advice and feedback on other people's designs.... Thre's more to them than just the looks! I think the world that they live in is also very important to take into consideration, you guys know your characters/worlds better than I do, so I feel like my advice might conflict with what you have established.

And that's about it for this post! I hope it was interesting to read. I want to go into design aspects of specific sets of some of my characters, but that'll have to be for another time.

Thanks for reading and your support! Results for the R18 poll coming up tomorrow (Not like you can't tell who won already anyways lol)