You Need To Make Uglier Characters

folks I fear that we might be moving in the wrong direction the characters are getting sanded down they're getting more homogenized than a gallon of milk they're getting Botox in OIC like their health insurance is about to run out actually that last one probably isn't the argument for anti- ugly that I think it is this isn't about making art worse it's not about justifying art style it's actually not even about like giving proper representation to unattractive people or something not with a 10-ft pole actually it's about introducing just the tiniest shred of courage and backbone to the fetal position that you've been creating from frankly it's like everyone's scared of their characters telling them you give me the ugly somewhere along the way in the efforts to make things higher resolution to achieve Perfection to make them more marketable and less offensive or obtuse and as widely accepted as possible characters are getting safer and safer I'm not naming names I'm not saying everyone's doing it this isn't about them all right it's about you what are you going to do about it actually I will name one name to make a point and that's the sludge that comes out of generative AI images that are made from stolen art the result of literally homogenizing of finding an aggregate average between faces bodies and details is a skew towards a conventional ideal of sorts and besides looking incredibly soulless and creepy the side effect that's come from it is a growing distaste for Perfection for from the people that have brains that are exposed to it is making a character cute or attractive a perfectly valid Choice yes are there other choices that can be made a lot more yes and the really interesting thing that I found is that making a cute design a little uglier will sometimes make them a lot cuter now me personally I don't make any ugly characters all right because they say you know you got to draw from experience and I don't have any with the don't don't zoom in on the shingles thing don't Zoom way more than talking about preferences or Trends or authenticity the idea behind this video is to get more interest into your character designs and The Balancing Act is this as we learn to draw things the right way as we learn what principles make something more appealing it's way too easy to keep playing it safe and airing on the side of pristine and ideal and a lot of times this comes from some inner motive to plate or appease or make the character that you think other people want to see and speaking of character designs this video is brought to you by unveil unveil is a site where you can organize into Worlds share and even sell your original character designs in a community of other artists writers and World Builders and explore their work too you can set up detailed galleries of your characters with multiple poses or illustrations of them all sorted together and add traits and lore your characters can all be grouped together into the worlds feature where everyone from the same universe or story can go together which will help you and anyone you'd like like to keep track of your ideas on unveil you can add individual illustrations to each character page you can share your characters with others publicly participate in big community events that they'll do regularly and even add designs or adoptables to the marketplace where they can be bought by others unveil is really trying to go against the grain of the current algorithm-driven social media landscape and is trying instead to return to that sense of a a community focused space for artists they're actually firmly anti nft and generative AI which is actually really refreshing to see they're clearly looking out for artists best interests unveils free to use so head over to the link in the description and check it out and thanks to them for sponsoring this portion of the video now as much as some principles of Art and Design will skew towards this safety and homogeny something that really shines through to make for appealing characters is specificity now hold on for a second because you're about to hear me say give characters unique traits and immediately some people's minds jump to giving them two different eyes or a special and unique piece of clothing or hairstyle what makes you make those value judgments why only three how to justify all of this paraphernalia somehow giving characters unique traits isn't necessarily about making them seem more special when we do that it often backfires into an almost desperate plea actually specificity is almost about proving that your character is authentic kind of like how weathering on an old building in Star Wars makes it feel more real or believable it's way easier to make something in that idealized safe corporate edges buffed off mindset than it is to make a character that feels like a real person that doesn't mean drawn in a realistic style or even human it means believable and even the most abstracted stylized sci-fi and fantasy colorful blob characters can benefit from being more believable so try this if you've never done it before I highly recommend Cafe sketching that's where you in a non creepy fashion observe and draw people that you see in a local public place now this is an opportunity to focus on any aspect of drawing and it can be really fun but it also especially helps with informing character I can't explain this any better than I can simply show you some examples of Cafe sketches done by my friend Max UL these are prime examples of specificity each of these people if you describe them to like a a police sketch artist or something are probably relatively average looking people none of them is quotee unquote special and probably none of them are going to be runway models anytime soon but it's that specificity drawing out aspects of these people and their perceivable personalities that make them interesting the way they're dressed the shape and body language are all telling a story visually and the art is pushing those ideas further than say a photograph of them could and yes I'm talking about your average photograph not the sort of Artful thing that a photographer could imbue a lot of character into so this is one of the most beneficial things that you can do for your character design chops because your subject matter will be varied but it will also be ordinary instead of Simply relying on what's popular or safe or special you can create interest where other people might have missed it what I also like about these sketches by Max is that they aren't inherently trying to punch down at anyone the motive isn't to make fun of someone at their expense and that's something that I do take issue with and say something like Boardwalk caricature art there that ugliness is often contrived or forced it's a way of picking at anything that doesn't form and even if it does distorting it until it registers as wrong uh which might make some people laugh but it probably just isn't interesting Cafe sketching will help you observe from authentic sources the same as using reference images will help you better represent a form or shape or Texture Cafe sketching will help you fill the tank for character design from real life instead of just other fictional characters these principles aren't exclusively about human character designs either one of the next ideas I want to float by you has to do with a belief that I feel very strongly about you should not be able to see a bunny's mouth they're hidden under cheeks and nose angled toward the floor for a reason so I doubt anyone's going to contest that rabbits are a quintessential cute animal they're docel big eyes and ears Nar a hard angle to be found on them hairs might be a bit more uh brolic but rabbits are decidedly in cute territory hold on before I put that in the video I've been saying brolic my whole life I just want to make sure the definition is oh this whole time I thought it was like an Old English word and it turns out I just grew up in New York so all that being said bunnies as a character design in my humble opinion become far more interesting even if the cuteness takes a hit once the Forbidden angle is introduced and that's when a bunny yawns here you take something that is otherwise 90% fluff and add a sudden 10% of sharp incizors framed in an extreme expression it's largely funny because of how it throws off our expectations for the rest of the creature and sort of looks like they're angry which is just a classic juxtaposition and if we want to pretend to be pretentious about it there's now a layer of depth having to do with what this creature is concealing and what it's potentially capable of either way it's no longer 100% one thing one note there's exactly one degree of complexity have we made it into an ugly creature in the conventional sense I don't really think so but we have made it ugly which is to say more interesting I feel like this summarizes one of the best ways to add interest to a character design at the very least if you're not pursuing it from the start you're not diluting the cuteness of a bunny towards being less cute you're pulling it into a more interesting place this is a good example of contrast but also of how you execute designs a lot of times newer artists will get overzealous about shape language and commit to only using round shapes or sharp shapes or angular shapes while this can play well stylistically and it is a good exercise it's easy for no part of the design to end up standing out just the same is using all one Hue or all one value ends up highlighting nothing all it takes is just a little bit of edge some some tooth pardon the bunny we Association something that provides a reason for a design to be individualized something as simple as a scar as overused as even that example is can ground a design with some history even as someone who is generally aiming for a and delightful vibe to most of their design and illustration work I usually still like to add something to a design to divert it off course in the stormers universe which takes inspiration from some of the design sensibilities of Jim Hensen the ugly comes from some intentional goofiness boo was once a much uglier character but he still is by no means the most oooo adorable thing there's still an element of awkwardness to him same goes for aous gangly height and unorthodox mouth shape or gangor hunched Asm even for various background and tertiary characters Altha remains an almost conventionally ugly character by some standards but the conceit with her doesn't have to do with her physical appearance it's that she's a bureaucratic boredom incarnate and that personality feels like it goes well with someone who looks like her even traits that don't necessarily make a character ugly like the damaged Wings on tlen the diminutive weakness in the expression of these two kid characters backx and Toyo or something as simple as the bulbous disproportionate head of this recent land shark-like messenger character dros all help the characters to feel like you haven't seen them a thousand times before I hope at least even when the result isn't explicitly ugly it's designed from a place of intentionality that has a goal other than making something as perfect as possible or feeling like it was designed to make you like them which almost always has the opposite effect and as disconnected as it seems Cafe sketching and studies like these have helped me develop that Variety in shapes and ideas I get that these aren't strictly ugly characters and I hope that helps make the point making your characters a little bit uglier does not mean you have to go Full Tilt into gross out and repulsive it's far more about specificity and Intrigue so it's possible there may be some incendiary nonsense that we opened this video with that might have implied that everyone's homogenizing their character designs and that would be outright false as the idealized photo realism of CG films becomes less important in the wake of spiderverse we're getting Aesthetics like the one in ninja turtles mutant Mayhem where human characters especially appear like rough and lopsided concept art this serves a narrative purpose that helps inform the Viewpoint of the main characters themselves mutants looking back at humans as other and different they may not be everyone's cup of tea but would you rather the artists coward in the corner hoping that nobody dislikes what they made there's there's really no time for that stuff honestly it's actually really refreshing that a lot of studios and Productions are adding the imperfections back into the work sort of like the fingerprints on a clay stop motion animation it's a nice reminder that this has a sometimes literal human touch going back to spiderverse even the design language including so many hard angled planes and characters facial structure like on Peter B Parker or Miguel O'Hara in a lot of other Productions the shapes on something like their nose would be rounded down or smoothed out and this goes doubly for feminine characters who are almost always always simplified that way but by including those angles we get something more raw something more prone to that interesting painterly lighting something more unique if your default drawing techniques involve some amount of this smoothing out in fear of making something that will possess the quality of being ugly it takes effort to reframe the way that you're approaching drawings but it starts with remembering that something that appears perfect isn't going to be memorable circling back to some of the earlier things we were saying the thing is that appearance is a vast spectrum of possibilities spanning skin and muscle and fat and feature variety the more observation that you can do to build a mental library of possibilities the more elasticity that you can give certain shapes it will serve to individualize your work that much more the problem with creating a character that's Flawless though is that if that's the impression that you got from someone in real life it probably means that you aren't seeing them clearly I think ultimately that the concept of making a character that is ideal idealized or objectified is going to be in diametric opposition to them being relatable and neither thing ends up being inherently right or better but I think a lot of times entire casts of characters look Cut From the same J crew cloth the same chisel jawlines and literally the same eyes not because the concept artists didn't come up with variation but because they were calculated to be the best choice by an executive somewhere or a teenager desperate to make every single character of their web comic their precious baby that ain't never done no wrong to no one they might make each and every one character perfect and special so that everyone will love them inadvertently it causes no one to care about any of them thanks again to unveil for sponsoring a portion of this video and thanks to you for making this channel possible at all you can get a bunch in return including beo backpack over on patreon.com Denison and if you're looking for a comprehensive character design education check out learn character design at learn character design.com which will be getting quite an update in the near future now is probably the best time there's ever been to hop on that thank you for watching and have fun creating well when you when you were creating characters fan uh what was the process back then I mean because Rob and I right now we do our own writing and our own drawing we we don't we don't collaborate with anybody anymore so that's the problem and I've been meaning to talk to you guys about that

Channel: Brookes Eggleston - Character Design Forge

Views: 6,600

Keywords: ugly characters, character design, brookes eggleston, character design forge, draw better characters, cafe sketching, specificity, drawing tutorial, artistic mindset, how to draw better

Id: ShygwXFjkS8

Length: 14min 45sec (885 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 27 2024