★ CHARACTER DESIGN - Intuitive approach // 5 characters full process // Gloamingvale

thank you skillshare for sponsoring my channel [Music] hey guys in this long time coming video i will give you an overview of my character design process let's call it the intuitive approach the reason why i'd like to call it that is because i personally do not like to complicate the process for myself with a myriad of options like you would typically see in art of books and professional character design portfolios i do think it's totally normal and often expected to give the client a lot of options it's a standard part of the process in many professional settings especially when the project development budget can afford the endless tweaks and options however when i'm designing characters for my own stories and my own personal projects i take a much much simpler approach which is what i will be sharing with you today so this will be a casual conversational type of video please don't interpret this video as a tutorial or some sort of instructional manual i simply want to chat about how i go about designing my own characters and also show you the entirety of the process of this drawing of five new characters that i did a couple of weeks ago so the first thing i want to do is address the hypothetical question of how can it possibly be enough to just draw a character once and call that a finished design because that's exactly what i do most of the time well i'm going to explain why i personally think that is completely acceptable firstly why would i even bother posing this question it's mostly because i come from a mindset of sometimes being bogged down by vague external expectations picked up from various sources over the years whether it be art school watching instructional videos like looking at tutorials and whatnot and this can be a huge hindrance to my creative process personally and i am willing to bet that there are many of you out there who can relate to this self-sabotage it's very common uh so that's why it must be dealt with first there are a lot of people and instructors out there who will profess one way of doing something and claim that it is the proper way of going about things and this is just how things must be done sometimes this can be more or less true i think especially when it comes to studying fundamentals but with a lot of other things not so much i remember being told by multiple sources that the process of character design requires a lot of exploration and a ton of crappy attempts until you finally arrive at a great design and it can be a tough road to the final great design but it's worth it because it's important to explore all the possibilities to arrive at the best one this is how you allegedly get from a mediocre design to a great design and is this true well i don't know probably if your end goal is greatness in my opinion though what ultimately supersedes this quote-unquote great result process is honestly just your personal priorities which is the number thing that you should take into account when you're approaching character design my point is you should just own your decisions the last thing you want to do is waste a bunch of time drawing a bunch of options just because you think that that's what you're supposed to do and that's how you're supposed to design characters so yeah my personal priority is to draw characters that i like to draw characters that are fun and to me a great character design is too nebulous of a concept to be objective and i just want to draw characters that i personally have fun drawing and that's it and i do not aim at greatness in this way at all so to me great character design is one i have a blast drawing and that's enough this is why drawing a character once and calling the design done is perfectly fine for my own personal purposes all right so let's move on to the process so before i do anything i need to know who this person is who is this person in my opinion this is the most important aspect of character design why design a character at all to tell their story i have never in my life sat down to design a character without already knowing who i am about to put a visual to at least to some degree i like to think of character design as simply letting this person reveal themselves to me if that makes any sense maybe that's because my approach is more from a writing perspective and just naturally has been and it can't help always becoming deeply involved with the narrative aspect but i have basically never designed a character for decorative purposes only this is probably why i never draw random people so in this particular instance i am designing five secondary characters that are the friend group of one of the main characters in my story the type of story that i'm writing is big long heavy on world building and has several protagonists so the secondary characters are plenty but the story is complicated and i do not yet know what will happen with these guys so i won't treat them as disposable pawns to fill some seemingly cookie cutter contrast rolls i go in considering the possibility that they might play more important roles in the future because who knows so i treat them like people right off the bat instead of just drawing randoms like while i'm already executing comic pages where they first appear obviously i can't do that with all characters that appear but since i know that these guys will be there in the background um they will reappear a bunch of times i figured i might as well just know who i'm dealing with preemptively so here's a list of what i would consider to be vital unskippable information before doing a character design so that would be their sex age name core personality traits their place in the contextual hierarchy of the story their socioeconomic status their aspirations or lack thereof in other words maybe a goal or something that they might have their basic family structure super simple like nothing too detailed and their relationships to each other also um a simple like one sentence that would be more than enough to get going so first is the basic visual cues which is sex agent name sometimes the name can come later but i like to think of one as soon as possible naming someone is what makes them feel more real to me so what i sometimes do is peruse lists of names and just take down all the ones that i like and then later use this list as a quick reference for character naming when i need to so the second is core personality traits uh the attitude they put out what they're generally like and what they are or aren't hiding beneath the exterior and how much of the exterior is calculated versus unnoticed by them this is typically highly informed by the other things that i mentioned so i will go on to say that the third thing is their place in the contextual hierarchy which in this particular case is the art academy in the town of gloamingvale in my story where they all reside and their socioeconomic status it's important to place characters within the world and determine what role they have in the story and in this world otherwise why are they even there at all this particular group are the student council they are all very high status and at the top of the student hierarchy in terms of school involvement and achievement so their general economic status is near the top to various degrees and they're basically all the rich kids and that informs their personality to some degree but this is still a lot of fun to do because despite occupying similarly high hierarchical positions and having high socioeconomic status they'll differ from one another quite a bit so and lastly um which should kind of be taken into account is their relationships with each other if you're designing more than one character so this is the most fun and probably the most relevant to the story but also somewhat complicated it's complicated because people's relationships are complicated obviously but i do like to know at least the gist of like what they think about each other and what their general attitude towards each other is it often builds upon itself organically if you just think about them so something you know to consider this obviously affects how they will look at each other and how they will interact with each other so i'm gonna give you a brief summary of the first character in this lineup and i will not get into the other ones because i feel like that'll just make the video ridiculously long so let's just start with the first character and her name is astrid ringwood she's 17 years old female and she sees herself as better than everybody else and sees noel who's the last character in this lineup and she is one of the main characters of the story as the only possible threat to her position but she enjoys having a friendly rival she also thinks that envy is beneath her and shuts that part of herself away which results in many underhanded jabs that just spill out mostly aimed at noel astrid is very confident and has been told her whole life that she's destined for greatness which she believes wholeheartedly making her somewhat lazy and so she mostly concerns herself with frivolous activities and isn't aggressively seeking status she thinks she's already at the top regardless which appears to be true for all intents and purposes she's from a very rich family and has an inappropriately generous allowance i won't bore you with her relationship to all the people in the lineup but other than noel the most important one is alma who is astrid's cousin she's the second character in the lineup they're pretty much inseparable and have been very close since birth so they're a bit like sisters astrid genuinely cares about alma but can be unintentionally condescending due to her lack of empathy alright seems like a good place to take a minute and tell you about this video sponsor skillshare skillshare is an online platform for learning new skills via focused classes that are broken down into mini lessons it's a place to find interesting projects to do in your spare time or expand your professional knowledge this platform curates classes taught by professionals in their fields and has an endless supply of new things to learn some of my favorite topics lately have been business development video editing and freelance as i make some plans for next year i came across a class that is of paramount importance to any small business owner or freelancer which i am both and this class is called bookkeeping for freelancers how to handle your finances by emily simcox i highly recommend this easy to adjust class on a topic that's super important if you want to become a full-time artist working from home if you want to try out skillshare check out the link in my description where you can get a one month free trial you can watch a lot of classes in a month so i would definitely recommend at least giving it a try i personally think it's totally worth it and i have watched many classes and learned a ton of things that are super helpful for my business and my art career so yeah the first thousand of my subscribers to click the link will get a free trial and now let's get back to the video i'm just gonna jump into the next point of discussion uh in the next part of my process and this is where i jump into actually drawing the characters so as you can see i have a very good idea of who i'm dealing with and so the next step is posing and i think that posing is everything this is something that i came to understand better and better over the years of working as a character designer i used to think that a pose just has to be fun and has to look good and doesn't matter that much because surely anybody would have the imagination to picture this character in a different pose that's completely wrong first of all that's a big assumption to make a lot of people actually don't have the imagination for that and secondly why even make that necessary at all it's a much more efficient uh approach to take the pose very seriously from the get-go and inject more into it than just a visual interest or movement and i do think it has to reflect the character's personality as much as possible always so i typically pick a pose that best communicates the basic personality of the character while i simultaneously decide their body type i basically decided to just do all five of these guys at once because that was my task for my story development and they're mostly seen together because they are a friend group so it seemed the most efficient and easiest thing to just do a line up so i can all at once decide on their heights and just how they look in relation to each other and noelle of course um she's the last one in the lineup like i mentioned and i pretty much put her there just for reference and i will never pass up the opportunity to draw her because she is i don't know i love her she's one of my favorites anyways so here's the gist of how i went about making the choices for these poses so i'm just gonna go from screen left to right and describe a little bit about each character astrid super confident naturally razor thin and feminine she knows that her piercing eyes and charm are more than enough to get what she wants from almost anybody alma a bit nervous and clingy to astrid they're always together she often feels lesser than her doesn't feel entirely comfortable in her own body and her posture kind of reflects that and she has a tendency to try and hide herself without really being aware of what she's doing so yes next is cali she's very outwardly confident to the point of overcompensating and she likes to draw attention to her body next is remy quiet proper and polite appreciates good craftsmanship he's lanky and thin skips a lot of meals and is exceptionally good at appearing very calm when on the verge of a mental breakdown from stress next is balthazar he's very easygoing confident flirtatious smart but unmotivated athletic and in top shape and lastly we have noel she's always in a hurry and obsessed with getting things done but always makes her to look like it's effortless and the illusion is pretty convincing she wakes up at the crack of dawn to jog and has to work very hard to not gain unwanted weight and keep up her appearance so those are the things that i had in the back of my mind while i was picking the poses for these characters and why did i go with these specific poses honestly it just felt right and sometimes it's impossible to tell how successful a post-choice really is so you just have to kind of use your best judgment and only focus on whether it feels true to the character that you're depicting which is exactly why it helps so much to have a really good idea of who it is that you're drawing maybe half the stuff that i just mentioned isn't even directly visually relevant to these poses but i still think it really helps me to create a feel of the character which i totally rely on um a great deal to be able to determine whether the pose looks looks right or if it actually looks like the character or not so the next and very important part is the visual context for costume design so by visual context i mostly mean taking the costume decisions of the character in relation to the context of the world and the story that they inhabit doing a pose and figuring out the body type can be somewhat done free of context um technically but you can't ignore it while designing costume so most of the information should be pulled directly from the context of the story and of course taking their personality and circumstances into consideration as well this particular lineup is pretty easy because they're all academy students so i'm just drawing their academy uniform which i previously designed like a few months ago so i already knew what it looked like and for that reason there isn't a whole lot to say when it comes to picking the costumes in particular but the thing that i wanted to talk about and as you can see they all have different shoes and accessories and that's what's so fun about doing character designs in uniform it gives you a great opportunity to draw special attention to these small differences and how they choose to wear the same clothing so i'll explain just a bit about each character so astrid likes her uniform perfectly fitted thinks that the uniform is a bit too serious and likes to wear lacy undergarments like a blouse instead of the regular issue one she keeps the accessories minimal but likes them to look aggressive and likes to wear very high platform shoes that are technically against regulations but she seems to be the only one who can get away with it alma likes to keep as much of her body covered as possible so she almost always wears opaque leggings and combat boots with an oversized jacket cali likes to keep her shirt tight and very unbuttoned wears a lot of bright gleaming accessories because she likes to draw attention to herself she loves gold wears different shoes every day and often changes her hair color and style you may probably picture what her closet would look like and it would be pretty bright and wild much like this kind of already hints at so next is remy he um he has absurdly expensive accessories but cherishes them and develops an attachment to them so he doesn't just purviously buy new expensive all the time his mother orders his uniforms for him and she always assumes that he's even taller than he actually is which is unfortunately the story of his life next is balthazar uh he's obsessed with sneakers as you can probably tell and likes to show off his wealth and status in a casual type of way so his attitude is like look at all my expensive and how nonchalant i am about it unlike these update losers and last we have noel she likes to accentuate the figure that she works so hard to keep but not too much so she's in a somewhat constant internal battle of do i want to bring attention to myself yes do i want to keep myself low-key also yes so she's unsaid at this point i'm kind of losing the plot of the video a little bit but i just wanted to mention that i do really really love all my characters even though they do have a lot of bad qualities and um i mostly feel complete unconditional love for them and i think for me that's also a massive component for making drawing them so fun and yeah so far only have one character who might have trouble sympathizing with but that's a story for another time it's definitely not one of these guys so anyway let's move on to the next level of figuring out where to go with the clothing and hairstyle of the characters so i'm going to talk about shapes shape design is a huge aspect of character design which most of you guys probably already know and as i've noticed most of the time that's actually the biggest topic of focus in other character design related videos that i've seen it's something that people tend to focus on or talk about the most but of course as with other things in my opinion it's a spectrum on the one hand you have these uh beautiful pixar type of character designs which are so heavy on the shapes that it's borderline abstract which totally works for their purposes and obviously their character designs are totally beloved and then you have the other side of the spectrum which is more like a comic book type of approach or maybe if even more realism type of game character designs where the shape design is a lot less present but you know there's still room for it i think the level of realism pretty much dictates the exaggeration of the shapes and i find myself to be somewhere maybe in the middle of the spectrum i would say i personally don't put a ton of conscious thought into how the shapes reflect the characters that i draw and it is more of a personal stylistic expression thing for me and i would say that there's a certain sharpness and maybe even like an aggression that characterizes my line work and artwork in general in a lot of instances especially when i do digital stuff but when i look back on these i did notice that i think i subconsciously use some shape language techniques without really like making it a conscious decision even though they are somewhat subtle um i can just go in and like observe some of my choices post hoc even though i didn't consciously make them as i was drawing these characters so with uh with astrid at first i thought she'd be your typical like beautiful blonde type of character like rachel mcadams and mean girls but then i thought astrid wouldn't dye her hair um because she thinks she's already perfect and in fact she loves the the fact that she doesn't need to be a blonde bombshell with big boobs to command attention and then she would side glance noel with disdain even though noel's a redhead anyways i ended up deciding that i want her to have short black hair and as i was sketching it it just came out very angular and sharp something about it actually kind of reminds me of a scorpion which feels about right and the rest of her features came out sharp as well with the thinner lips and angular face i wanted to um i wanted her to look like an intimidating person and i think i pretty much kind of achieved that with the use of straight lines and sharp angles and you know obviously very straight posture so the next is alma and alma is essentially kind of like a teddy bear that tries to look threatening she's an uptight nervous person um who tries to look laid back and casual so i wanted her hair to be bold but also kind of fluffy and endearing looking uh she thinks it makes her look scary but in reality i think she just looks cute i feel like that's what it looks like to me so it works for the time being and um yeah i know i didn't mention much about her shapes per se but i honestly feel like i take more narrative to i make more narrative decisions than visual ones and whatever happens visually is just inexplicable because on my my only guide is usually just whatever looks good and feels right for the character which is exactly why i titled this the intuitive character design process so next is cali who is the peacock of the group so i wanted her silhouette to kind of pop and look more lively than the others she's very petite and in great shape and she's got a bit more defined muscles and her overall vibe is kind of like a party girl chaotic type of person this uh this is why her tie is in a bow and she's got these big earrings i went over several different hairstyles in my head and they all kind of worked i couldn't really pick any particular one that was better than the rest so i figured she does seem like someone who would frequently change her hair and bleach her hair and and then come crying to astrid about how her hair feels fried to which astrid would say that's what you get for being extra so yeah moving on remy was very straightforward i knew that he was the tallest in the group um but also skinny and proper not particularly into individuality the classic kind of like lanky intelligent quiet nerd type relatively stereotypical just preppy and clean the only reason why he isn't wearing glasses is because cali rudely pointed out that he looks like a boring nerd with them on so he went through the trouble of switching to contact lenses but nobody noticed next is balthazar so here i actually ran into a little bit of a problem he was more difficult than the rest so maybe some of you guys know uh my other older characters uh balthazar is sweet's little brother um sweet is one of the girls in my cover page so if you want to get a quick visual on her um it's like my youtube page cover um image thing anyways so yes sweet has white hair and at first i wanted balthazar to also have white hair as well i didn't really think too hard about whether it was like a genetic thing or not but anyways unfortunately i i ran into the following problem which is echo from league of legends even though i could try to make balthazar look different i still feel like people would compare him to echo just because he's a popular black dude character with white hair and especially after a cane came out he had a couple of different hairstyles so that pretty much like really killed my up like possibilities there um because there's there's only like a narrow lane when it came to hairstyles that i could choose for balthazar because he has a certain vibe so anyway i had to sacrifice the white hair and spare myself from a million comparison comments um i know that it may sound stupid to do that uh and honestly i am personally not too concerned with originality because i do think the personality of the character is more important than their visuals or at least as important but and they are quite different characters obviously but like the vast majority of artists who create their own characters i'm not a fan of comments that just point out how it just looks like some other other characters so you know whatever it was a it wasn't justified sacrifice for me and so balthazar ended up having regular old black hair which is you know honestly fine i figured that maybe it would be refreshing to just have a very normal looking dude character after all he is a pretty stereotypical popular jock type of guy so he's got his own problems but for basic purposes he's just like astrid's male counterpart he's the top student most popular guy confident by nature etc and so lastly i might as well talk about noel even though i designed her a million years ago she actually hasn't changed all that much at all from the very start and um it's been a crazy long time but yeah some of you may remember she used to have very big curly hair and she still does she just puts a lot of work into taming it for school so like i said she toes the line between drawing attention to herself and not wanting any attention and i just wanted to quickly mention that all my main characters in the story have a serious problem with two directly opposing desires i won't get into hers in detail as it would probably be somewhat of a spoiler territory thing but she's constantly biting off more than she can chew and let's just leave it at that and now i'm going to talk about the last little bit which is the individual quirks so yeah the inconsequential individual quirks of the characters that are totally irrelevant to the plot or anything else for that matter but to me this adds a lot of depth to my ability to treat them as if they're real people which like i've mentioned a million times i'm sure is of paramount importance when i try to do character designs or like make characters at all so it's these small idiosyncrasies that make them feel real to me so i'm just gonna you know list the characters one by one again and i'll tell you a little bit about these small character quirks that i have for them so astrid uh all her piercings are fake except for the ears but just a simple single piercing on both ears she wants to reserve the right to change her mind about the piercings and she thinks of her body as a holy temple alma tries to downplay her wealth but she is obsessed with alexander mcqueen and just can't help it cali is internal chaos translated directly into external chaos so she wears different shoes every day and different hair every week and remy is in love with cali but she will never notice this and he will never say anything balthazar thinks that him and noel would make a power couple and uh he's engaged in this pursuit for purely sociopathic reasons he's never even bothered to wonder what kind of person noel actually even is to him he's she's just a shiny veneer and a projection she obviously shows zero interest in him but he constantly tries to wear her down with his shameless flirting and astrid hates this she thinks despite her like a romantic interest in balthazar she should nevertheless be the one he pursues because it just makes more sense to her and noel um it's very important for her to appear a certain way to her friends but she still has a very sentimental side and wears a very cheap plastic beaded bracelet that fiona gifted her when they were little astrid frequently makes fun of her and points out how quaint and ugly it is and noel is a little bit embarrassed so she tries to hide it under her sleeve but she still never takes it off and wears it every day and that's it so i realized that most of this video just talks about my characters which you know is probably fine because i did notice that some of you guys asked me to talk about my characters in a lot of previous videos so hopefully that delivered but yeah i still tried to structure it in a way that mentions the conceptual necessity and uh then provides the specific example so it's not just me rambling about my characters like they're real people like a crazy person so yeah i hope you guys enjoyed seeing the entirety of the process of this lineup as well i did kind of go back afterwards to fix a little bit of cali's face i think i just like did small changes to some of the characters faces post post completion um i because i finished this lineup very kind of quickly and then sometimes it can um doing like finishing a bunch of characters in a row too quickly can blind me to some small details that i will like notice a week later and then go back and fix so yeah anyways thank you for watching and i hope to make more content related to my story in the future definitely ramping up the production to some degree lately and so hopefully i will be able to start publishing the actual comic within the next few months according to my plans so so as you guys can probably tell i edited the video after recording the audio and as it turns out i had some footage that i couldn't really fit in but i still wanted to show you which is like of the very end of the polishing process of the entire lineup as you can see i kind of colored them like all at the same time darting a lot back and forth between the characters so honestly i'm just going to leave the silence to play out the rest of the process video and um you can see the final at the end so yeah your support and viewership of this video and my other videos is super appreciated and i'll see you in my next one bye [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Cosmic Spectrum Art

Views: 24,875

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Id: siKUOveoiog

Length: 36min 3sec (2163 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021