5 Ways to Make a Character More Likable

hey this is Brooks with character design Forge took a little break there for making videos after I launched my course learn character design just to catch up with everything the response to the course has been amazing the students who have enrolled have been loving it if you haven't seen it already head over to learn character design comm to find out more today I want to talk about five things that make for more likable characters so let's jump right into this the first thing that I want to talk about is actually something I've brought up before when it comes to making characters likable and that's flaws now because characters are innately human and humans are imperfect then we need to give our characters something that makes them imperfect in some way now this could be usually a personality flaw that tends to be the strongest way to fly your characters it could also be making them different physically or disadvantaged physically the best way that I can liken this is to a rock climbing wall now think of a wall that's completely smooth and a glassy surface there's no way that you can scale that there's no way to climb up and that's kind of like a perfect character there isn't really anything there that we can latch on to to feel but add some flaws and imperfections that's like those hand grips and footholds on a rock climbing wall now we can get somewhere we understand something about the character because we as imperfect people see ourselves in them more on that point in a minute the second thing that I want to talk about is honesty versus pandering and this is very reflective upon you as the artist now within the field of character design we're not trying to make completely esoteric and abstract characters or artworks we're trying to create something that has appeal oftentimes though you'll see a character that crosses this line though into pandering now what do I mean by that well we appreciate it when characters have a genuine quality to them it's a lot like people when a person is putting on a front and pretending to be someone that they aren't we're sort of repelled by that so when a character is designed to be so cool or strong or ultra-confident it's very easy for that to be read as pandering now these qualities can still manifest themselves if we're designing from a place of honesty the difference though is that honesty means designing a character from a place a feeling and emotion that's true to you something that you understand now it's easy to pull the wool over children's eyes with these ultra confident glassy characters but in order to be truly good your character needs to have some depth this goes back to the old adage of right what you know you need to be creating characters from a place that you understand something from your life a feeling that you have or perhaps based off of a person that you know really well no matter if a character is an alien a robot a creature a personified inanimate object all of these characters are humans no matter what skin they're wearing our third tip which falls in line with the first is to show our characters struggle this may manifest itself as our character being an underdog we are intrigued by a character that's on a journey so try and show what obstacles they have whether they're internal or external the fourth thing is so important that's to clarify exaggerate and clarify make the features of the face bigger make it easy to understand their expression we want your audience to see a character and immediately know who they are and what they are feeling the fifth tip is to ground your characters in reality now this is something that's really easy to do and it's a trap that I fall into a lot where you're creating your characters based off of really obtuse or abstract shapes or putting them in these really weird or alien settings now the thing is that when you do that you need to balance that out and ground your characters in reality you need to create this character with something that the every person the lay person can latch on to and understand this could be a feeling or a common truth or understanding for example you could create an alien character but perhaps he's surrounded by paperwork and they're clutching their head in frustration instantly that's a feeling that people understand and it's something they could even empathize with people love to do this they love to draw comparisons to things that they already understand now something that kind of bugs me a lot is a set of words it's this reminds me of and you'll see people doing this with things that it's very obvious what connection they're making or what comparison they're making like you'll have something that's very obviously inspired off of Darth Vader or even a black dog wearing a Darth Vader mask and they'll say this reminds me of Darth Vader now as the creative person or the artist we're sitting there saying well yes that was the point but the person loves to make that connection themselves now people may not be expressing themselves with this reminds me of but people are doing that internally it's one thing for people to simply take in knowledge of things and observe them but once you've made that personal connection something that they can understand that reminds them of themselves or something that's important to them then you've created something that they can care about now as the creative person we're always trying to express ourselves so we want to make new exciting things ground that hasn't been treaded before but we need to strike this balance that's it for me today thank you for watching thank you for liking thanks for subscribing your appreciation your attention it really means a lot to me my course learn character design is essential for anyone that is learning or wants to improve their character design even if you can't draw it will get you to a place where you can be confident in your ability and start creating characters that people care about I'm a little over 80 days through my 100 days 100 character series you can see that over on instagram at bagel denizen or instagram comm slash bagel denizen and i'm looking to see what i can do in the future obviously I will not stop making characters I'd like to keep up a certain pace after these dailies series and I'm trying to see how to sustain that how to sustain creating characters telling stories and teaching people through these videos and through other channels so I'm thinking that that may be punctuated by something like patreon I would love to hear your thoughts about that I would love to spend more of my time doing these things right now most of my time is taking up with client work and so anything that you guys do to support that will help offset it we'll talk more about that soon thank you for watching and have fun creating

Channel: Brookes Eggleston - Character Design Forge

Views: 1,086,679

Rating: 4.9586658 out of 5

Keywords: 5ways, 5tips, likeable, social engineering, drawing, learn to draw, art education, art tutorial, learn art, character design, learncharacterdesign, characters, storytelling, writing, flaws, original characters

Id: hHSTa7XPeHc

Length: 6min 54sec (414 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 10 2016