How I go about designing characters

Character design is probably the most popular form of art that exist int he digital age. Characters are how we relate to stories, situations, and design language. While there are numerous ways to go about the process of creating a , this is usually my method when constructing one and I’ll be using the bellow design as an example from a storyboard projecting I’ll be working on.

Bug-out-man…?

First thing you’re gonna want to do is pull your references.

You might be asking if we’re trying to make our own design why would we need references? We’ll there’s 2 reasons.

1. Being creative is hard, and more than likely what you’re thinking of doing has probably already been done somewhere else. What makes it yours is your perspective and execution that can make these ideas feel new and fun.

2. If 1. Is true, then all that work is done for you somewhere else. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when everyone’s already on hoverboards… or something like that. Either way, it’s easier to start from somewhere someone has already tracked then doing a bunch of work that’s going to get you to the same place anyway.

Once you get over these truths you can make a mood board or reference image in order to understand what kind of design you want to make.

More bug people.

Now With my initial design I wasn’t trying to do anything too out there considering this is more of a personal project not for commercial use, and I was looking to capture more of a genre then try to come up with a completely original idea. I knew my Design was going to be very reminiscent of Kamen Rider 1 (seen in the top 2 images above) and I knew I wanted expressive emotions to be shown which I took form Spider-man. While both these idea’s independently have been recognized, having them work together in the simplest way helps give the character purpose and reason for the design choices.

I also wanted to be very conscious of the colors and separate important parts of the body so when action comes into play it is very easy to distinguishes what part of the body is moving or at least imply that the points of interest are different from the rest of the figure.

In storyboarding I can’t imagine this would be important as most storyboards are done in greyscale to save time and are more concerned with blocking out the scenes of animation. I do think though that sometimes it’s important to distinguish color separation through greyscale so keep that in mind as it might effect composition of a scene or can affect a block of animation

Going back to the focused of character design, its really important that you just keep in mind that when designing your characters to give them purpose. While you don’t have to answer every question as to who they are who how they came to be, I do think it helps a lot in answering the questions that relate directly back to what the character looks like.

Do they have scars? If yes, then how did they get them? Does this person feel fast or slow? Why would that be beneficial to what this character does? Answering more of these questions will help you navigate your design choices and the more grounded these answers are, the more these characters feel alive and thought out.