My Character Design Process 😈 Redesigning my OC London 😈

hi guys so today we're going to be talking about character design and this is something that I get like way too excited about so I'm sorry in advance for the long video but I know a lot of you guys have your own characters or you're interested in making your own characters so hopefully this video helps you guys out a little bit I'm just gonna be going through my personal process for designing a character it's definitely not the only way you know I'm sure there's like so many methods out there how to design a great character but this is just kind of the process that I go through and in order to illustrate it I'm actually going to be redesigning one of my own characters I'm gonna be redesigning my demon character named London she is probably one of my oldest o'seas I made her years and years ago and she has gone through so many changes over the years but her kind of core personality has always remained the same so I just wanted to take this opportunity to create like an official kind of character sheet for her because you know I've waffled about with different outfits and even different like body shapes and stuff over the years as my art style has evolved so I just kind of wanted to nail down a design and sort of a little bit of a backstory I definitely don't have her whole story worked out but I've got a little bit and yeah so let's just get into it so I have kind of like a Venn diagram approach to character design I like made a little visual for you guys here but like the three areas that I look at are the characters personality and backstory the environment that the characters in and you know just the general like visually pleasing miss of the design and that has like a lot of different aspects but like the personal personality and like backstory that is things like you know your characters traits your character skills their profession any like past history or whatever events in their past that like shaped them as a character that kind of goes into the personality circle and then like environment you're thinking about the world they live in you're thinking about the society you know the government what values that society has the time period that they live in and then for like the visually pleasing section I think about things like shape language I think about the colors that are used I think about silhouette and I personally like my characters to be pretty simple but you want your character to be overall easy to read but also distinguishable you want them to be able to stand out from like a crowd so if you drew them in like a crowd of people you want to be obvious like this is the character you should be focusing on and the goal with this is to find a place with your character design where all three of those things overlap so for example with London in past designs that I've done of her you know she's her outfits have demonstrated her characters traits her expressions have demonstrated her character traits but it hasn't necessarily reflected her environment because I always envisioned her in a kind of semi futuristic world not like super high-tech stuff but definitely more futuristic than right now and the clothes I used to draw her in you know they were very much modern day like today type athleisure clothing and you know that fit with her personality she's a really lazy person and so obviously she's not going to put much effort into her outfit but you know it doesn't necessarily fit with that kind of semi futuristic feel of her environment so with her previous designs I was kind of missing that environment element and you know I definitely think that with character design iterations are really important like I don't think that I could have designed this design of London without having drawn all of those kind of previous versions it takes drawing the character a lot and kind of like tweaking them and throwing around different ideas and you know that's kind of how the story starts to develop and kind of like marinate in your mind so like don't expect yourself to draw like a perfect character in one go definitely give yourself some time whether you know you're the kind of person like me who kind of lets a character to evolve over years or if you're trying to like draw character quickly for a project or working on you know give yourself the time to just sketch out very loose ideas and just get it down on paper and let it evolve and build off of those ideas because it's definitely not gonna happen in in one go characters they're complex you know a good character is is deep they're complex they're all multifaceted and you know you're not gonna get that in just one go so don't like beat yourself up if you feel like you know it's taking a while to create your character it'll it'll kind of happen eventually but you can certainly like push it along by experimenting and trying new things and putting new ideas on paper so let's get back to what I'm doing now right now I'm actually I just created some general bodies really kind of loose sketches and I'm trying out some outfit ideas and for me when I get to outfit ideas I like to try out a lot of different options I personally find clothes very hard to design for so I like to kind of give myself the freedom to try a bunch of different things and see what works for this one I only did two because you know it's mainly because I've been drawing London for years and I kind of have a good sense of the her style in terms of her personality these designs were more me trying to kind of make her outfit a little bit more futuristic but still maintaining that athleisure vibe I definitely turned to Pinterest a lot when it comes to designing a characters outfit I usually create like vision boards or like mood boards for my character that have like clothes references you know shoes hairstyle expressions colors general just moods that kind of help me get into the characters headspace so that's definitely a really helpful thing if you're designing your character especially if you're a pretty visual person to kind of be able to see that visual representation of the character while you're working so at this point in kind of like the clothing design one thing that really helps me is to look at the silhouette that I've created so if you take away all the line aren't all the details and you just fill your character with black what shapes do you have and this can kind of help you figure out if you've created a unique looking character you know on one extreme if you put too many things on the character they might just look like a blob when you put them in silhouette form and that doesn't read very easily on the other hand you know say you put your character and all like tight things and they have short hair when you turn into a silhouette there there's nothing interesting nothing that defines them as a character so that can be like a really really useful indicator as you're creating your outfits or as you're creating your characters in general if you do use kind of more exaggerated proportions of your character and then at this point once I have design I like I usually go into procreate and just do color studies there just helps me be able to work faster and more efficiently and try more combos and experiment more so these are the three ideas that I came up with I did really like the first one but ultimately I ended up going with the third one simply because I felt like it worked better with London's character she's definitely more of an antihero character she has a pretty questionable moral come and I thought that the darker colors kind of represented that more darker character and you know the yellow colors it it did kind of feel a little bit too modern-day a little bit too now whereas the black add red something a little more futuristic to me so that's why I went with that one another reason I wrote that one is because London actually has yellow eyes and for me when I draw her face because she has purple skin the yellow eyes really stand out so it allows me to create very kind of striking and piercing glares and expressions that just just really work well with their personality and if I had sort of a lot of yellow on her outfit the power of the yellow in her eyes would kind of be like not not as significant so that's why I ended up going with the color scheme that I did honestly I could probably like go on and on about like color language and character design for like so long but maybe I could do another video about that I'm kind of interested in doing like a video on color language and character design and shape language and character design let me know if you guys would be interested in that but as a little side note another thing that definitely helps me with picking colors is taking away the liner and just looking at the flat colors and another thing you can do is actually pull the saturation down and look at your color scheme in black and white and this will kind of key you in on whether or not you have enough contrast in the colors it's definitely hard to tell when you have mean certain colors like red and green they look like super different when the colors are fully saturated but pull the saturation down they're actually like the same tone of grey and so you want to look for something that has enough contrast in the colors that you pick I think that's all I had in terms of like the technical stuff so I hope I haven't been like boring you guys with like color theory and junk like that I personally find it really fascinating how much of an impact color can have on a design like just changing the colors of a character can totally like change up how people read that character and the assumptions they make about that character when they see them it's fascinating but I guess one thing I I wanted to touch on in this video and I don't know how to transition into it so we're just gonna go for it and that is necessity over aesthetic so like for everything that you do in your character you know whether it's the clothes or like a specific feature or a specific color I think it's really important to ask yourself like what is the purpose why is this here and if you can't answer that question based on you know your character's personality the environment your character lives in then your character doesn't really need that thing you know I definitely see a lot of people just like piling on things like to their character like to different color eyes scars colorful streaks in their hair lots of jewelry and honestly I mean for me it just kind of confuses the design I mean it's definitely an aesthetic thing like a lot of people like the look of that but in terms of like a character design perspective it makes the character hard to read because you don't know what to focus on but like so for example if your character has just one piece of jewelry you maybe it's like a unique necklace that has a story behind it it was like given to York by your sister or something you know this adds to the character and it adds story and personally I find that memorable memorability comes down to simplicity and like for me when I'm designing characters my goal is would someone be able to draw this character after seeing them once would they be able to get like the general concept of the character and recreate it after seeing them one time that's ultimately like what you're going for that is what makes a memorable character and you know you kind of have to berate yourself from your character a little bit you know just putting things that you like into your character doesn't necessarily enhance the character itself and this can definitely go like the other direction too you can definitely oversimplify a character and then they kind of lose their their interest and this is something that I've personally been very guilty of I always draw characters very simple I focus on just simple shapes and colors but what I realized is always missing from my character designs in the past is some like unique identifiable feature thing object whatever to the character so for example like I used to always draw London she was like this demon with a lot of attitude and athleisure gear but she didn't really have anything that kind of hinted about who she was and you know what her backstory was so there wasn't really anything contributing to her story she was kind of a flat character she didn't have that that kind of dimension that I think a really good character should have so what I tried to do with this design was add a little bit of that in and I did it with those kind of chunky ear tags earring things that kind of like mechanical looking I always pictured her to be in like a semi utopian society but kind of like under the surface it's definitely pretty dystopian and the government's controlling like way too much crap and the idea was that the government kind of realized that that in order to create a perfect society you needed to have a little bit of unease a little bit of crime and in a sense like a common enemy otherwise people kind of fall into minor squabbling and then that evolves into there's conflict and it just exaggerated from there so what they did is they made kind of a deal with the devil I guess you would say and they employed the demons of Hell the underworld whatever you want to call it to create kind of minor conflicts in the your cities of the world and each demon in each city was actually named after the city itself so London is the demon that haunts the City of London and obviously when you make a deal with the devil it definitely has some sub risks you have a very high potential to get screwed over so they created these ear tags to create some kind of failsafe and I haven't quite figured out what that failsafe is whether it incapacitates the demon or somehow allows them to take control over them or something it's some kind of mechanical failsafe that protects them if the demons decide that they don't want to listen to the government anymore or where want to do their own thing or they want to you know disobey whatever they were supposed to do so that kind of is here it's a small little object but it kind of adds a little bit of dimension to her story another thing I've kind of always drawn with London is this kind of cute ghost companion but he's never really had a story or a reason so I came off the idea that it's some kind of person that she sort of killed someone who undeserving a good person that she killed you know the idea that the demons of Hell they punish people who are bad people who deserve it well they some circumstances she ended up killing this guy and now he quite literally haunts her and you know he's a ridiculously good person almost annoyingly good and he kind of acts like a conscious for London and I thought it would be a good way to kind of one balance out her bad nature and to kind of progress the story cuz obviously antihero characters they need some kind of some assistance to kind of progress the story and help them to start make make good decision do you know what I mean and then the last thing I drew was a weapon for her I always imagined her using like spiked baseball bats but I thought it might be a little more unique and interesting to you two cricket bats and she's she lives in London so I thought that was kind of funny but it's pretty cool I just like the whole kind of spiked bat aesthetic and I think that adds like a little bit of a unique twist but anyway I hope you guys like this video I know it was really rambly and long but let me know if you want any more character design videos in the future and let me know what you think of London's new design and I'll see you the next one bye you

Channel: Chelsea Gracei

Views: 164,597

Rating: 4.9845152 out of 5

Keywords: character design, original character, OC, character design tutorial, character design tips, character design process, original character design, how to design a character, how to design a character for animation, how to design a character for a comic, designing a character, design characters, make an oc, tutorial, art tutorial, character development, shape language, unique characters, design process

Id: J8FCtWujstc

Length: 17min 48sec (1068 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 22 2020