Character Design Course: Practical Steps To Design Your First Character!

1. Introduction: Hello guys, welcome to character design course, practical steps to design your first character! My name is Elvis Wairia I'm a 2D animator and Illustrator. With 3yrs experience in the animation industry. This character design course is a collection of illustration classes meant for beginner and intermediate character artists. In this class, I'm going to share with you guys six practical steps for designing your character from start to finish. In this course, we will go through coming up with your character idea and story, finding inspiration, exploration and rough sketches, refining your character, pose an expression tests, and finally, character turnarounds. Character design is a process of trial and error and experimentation and seeing the final results of your imagination is one of the most satisfying things ever.. If you do it right of course.. At the end of this class, you'll not only have all the required tools to bring awesome characters and stories to life, but also have complete and fully colored character drawings to add to your portfolio. I can't wait to share my knowledge with you guys. And most importantly, I can't wait to see what you guys come up with by the end of the class. That being said, let's get started! 2. Who's Your Character?: So before we start designing our character, we need to know who our character is. What's their story? Before drawing anything, you need to write down some notes. This is mostly important if you're designing characters for your own personal project or projects. Obviously, when you're working at a studio as character designer, your supervisor or director is going to give you a character description that, you will use to bring a character to life. This part of the process, not only entails coming up with the visual attributes of your character, but also their character traits. So what do I mean by this? I went ahead and opened an old project I made. This is an old pitch bible for a series idea I had. These are my main characters. If I go down here to my character lineup, you can see that I have a variety of characters. And if you look at each and every one of the characters, you can see that there are visual and just character traits that differentiates them from the previous or next character. Everyone looks different. Different sizes, different expressions and poses that basically tells the viewer who the character is. And so that's what I mean by the visual attributes and the character traits. So this is something you should consider before you start designing your characters. Not all character traits can be visually communicated. Sometimes when you watch a TV show or movie, you may think a character is a certain way, but after watching, you find out that there's more to the character than meets the eye. Or sometimes you may find out that you were completely wrong with your assessment. For example, a character might come off as strong and confident, but maybe deep down they're insecure, or they're unsure of themselves. Or sometimes you may look at a character and think that they are the bad guy or the the villain, but after you watch the show or the movie, in the end you find out that maybe that was like a way to confuse the audience and add suspense to the story. For example, if I go back to my pitch Bible, we have my main character here called Gakuru. As you can see, he comes off as confident and happy. But from the story I wrote, he feels a little bit misunderstood. and their is a bit of insecurity in him. This is because he gets into trouble a lot and so sometimes he feels like everyone is out to get him So yeah, he feels misunderstood. And most importantly, here we have another character... She's the principal in the school. You also saw her in the lineup here. So she's the principal of the school. And as you can tell by looking at her from the two images I just showed you, she comes off as mean looking and angry. But from the story I wrote, the idea I had, there's actually more to her. There's actually more to her story. So she may look one way, but she's actually kind and she cares about her students.. She just was raised in a harsh environment and was taught to basically give out tough love. So that's why she basically comes off ...or looks mean.. but she's actually not mean if you, once you get to know the story. So yeah.. This is one way that you can throw off your audience. To make them think your character is one way, but they're actually not. So as you can see, not giving away all your character traits or attributes may actually make the story better and more unpredictable to your audience. For my characters, I'm going to create a 12-year old boy from Nairobi, Kenya. He loves football or soccer, depending on where you're from. He's a happy kid and loves the outdoors. He may have ADHD because he's very hyper and doesn't like sitting around. This unfortunately affects his education, and he doesn't do well in school because he has a hard time concentrating. He just wants to be outside playing with his friends. I think I'm going to give him a small dog, which his father found on the streets as a stray puppy, and they've been inseparable ever since. So..I think I'll add that into the story. The mom doesn't like the dog too much. Based on my life. Also, let's give our character name. I think I'm going to go with the name 'Brayo'.. Brayo is a nickname used for the name Brian and it's very common where i'm from. I'm going to keep my character simple. But for you guys, you can go as wild as your imagination let's you. I'm talking aliens, magic, mermaids, anything you want, just go crazy. And that's it! Now that we have an idea of who our character is, Let's look for reference images that we will use in the exploration process, which is next. So see you in the next video guys.Take care. 3. Finding Inspiration (Research): So now that we know who our character is, Let's find images that will help us in our design process. References are very useful and I don't know any artist working professionally who doesn't use the them. I personally use Pinterest and Google to find the images I need for my character designs. So before we start, I'd like to give a disclaimer. PLEASE DO NOT STEAL OTHER PEOPLE'S WORK! References are used for inspiration. So do not copy paste other people's work. Just be original.. Take inspiration from what you see and make something that's original. So let's get started! So this is my Pinterest, this is my homepage... As you can see, these are all the things I've used as reference for previous projects. It recommends based on what I've search for in the past. All of this stuff I've used in my designs. Here you can see character designs and images of a mother braiding her daughter's hair, which I've used before on a previous project. You can also see dresses and stuff. So yeah...You can go here and search for kids... I'm not the fastest at typing... And as you can see, you have a bunch of references you can use for your work. I also like going to Google and searching... Hmm...Since I'm designing an African child, maybe I can type in African kids playing... Sometimes it recommends some WILD stuff, but anyway...Which I've searched for before, as you can see here, 'kids playing with tyres'. I had an idea for a painting piece of kids playing with car tyres.... So as you can see, this is how like your average African child looks like playing with various tyres and stuff... So I'm going to go ahead here in Pinterest and in my Google search here and basically select the images that i'd like to use for my character design. So I'll get back to you guys...A few moments later.. Yeah, so I went ahead and downloaded all the images that I would need for this. And these are my reference images. As I work on the character designs I may go online and maybe look for something specific to add onto this. But for the most part, these should be enough for me to design my characters. Now that I have reference images that I'll need to create my characters for this class, let me show you an example of how references have helped me in past projects... These are some designs from an old personal short film that I produced a while back (Called 'UA') As you can see, my story is based on characters that exist in a traditional African setting. That means that my references should match with my story. Before I started designing these characters, I went ahead and searched for various images, including reference images for their house, references for the characters, their hairstyle, beads, clothing.. references for props such as pottery in the film. And finally, Mask reference images, which I used to design the mask of the villain in the story. On top of this, I also looked for various images that I used to create a mood board for the film. A 'Moodboard' is a collection of images, colors and general, design ideas that are used to capture the overall ambiance or mood of your film... As you put your reference images together, remember your story, the setting of your story, and who your characters are. This is a very pivotal step that will make or break your designs. So go ahead and do the same. Look for images that you may need for your specific characters. If it's an alien or mermaid... or a giant Cyclops or something... Whatever you need to get started. Just make sure you have your collection of reference images and then we can get started in the next process. So see in the next video. Take care. 4. Exploration (Rough Sketches): Now that I have the reference images that I'll need, let's bring our characters to life! In this video, we will start by doing rough sketches of our character and by the end, we'll pick the one that we like the most and proceed with that. So, I start by setting up my canvas size. I personally like using 5,760 pixels by 3,240 pixels for the width and height respectively. This is basically an '1080p' times three. This is the resolution I'm most comfortable working in, but sometimes I prefer an even bigger canvas size, if I want my illustrations to look crispier. After this, I import and turn on my reference images and start drawing. I do have a second screen, so I actually have more reference images that I'm using that you guys can not see. This is because I don't want to fill my canvas with too many reference images and I can have more space to draw. In this class, I'm going to sketch four versions of my characters based on the description we came up with in the 'Who is your character' video. It is not a good idea to go with the first design. Multiple character exploration sketches will help you come up with the best design possible for your project. Four isn't THE number. I'd highly recommend that if you can, do more than this, this part of the design process is a trial and error phase. And so the more exploration sketches you do, the better. I want my character to basically represent what your average 12-year-old boy looks like. Especially from the early 2000s era and earlier. When we d had no phones, no internet (at least where I'm from)... We basically spent the whole day playing outside, especially when schools were closed and even if there were open, we would go home by around 4pm, sit down and do our homework. Maybe watch a little bit of TV if a cartoon was on at the time, and then go out and play with our friends till sundown. As you can see, my first character is a bit rough. One advice I'd give you guys, is to do warm-up sketches before you start designing your character. This will help you to loosen up a bit and be more confident when you start. I'll give you guys more tips, tricks, and resources in one of the future videos in the class that will help you in your character design journey. So make sure to stick till the end. I'm going with more 'rounded features' for this character in order to capture that friendly, 'child-like' look. The clothing is inspired by what kids from my area mostly wear. Especially the foot wear. A lot of African kids play outside with crocs and flip-flops and not shoes. My character is not from a wealthy background and so the references, you see on my screen and some that are off screen, captures exactly what I want. I want my character to have a tooth gap or a missing tooth... This isn't necessarily based on logic but.. whenever I see kids playing on the streets and one or a couple of them are missing a tooth or teeth, It makes them look more adorable and innocent. They're just smiling ear to ear, damn near missing all their teeth, enjoying and living their best lives. Finally, based on my character description, 'Brayo', my character, loves playing soccer or football (depending on where you're from). And so I will design him in a soccer jersey on. I decided to give him a number eight on his shirt. Number eight is his favorite number because that's the age that he discovered his love for the sport. Once I'm done with the rough designs for my character Brayo, I decided to combine my second design with my fourth one and proceeded with that as my 'final design'. Now that I'm done with Brayo, let's move on to Brayo's dog. In the beginning, I wan't sure what type of dog I wanted, and so I designed different types of dogs based on various reference images that I found online and liked. In the end, I decided that I will go with a puppy and not a fully grown dog. I believe that there's something special and relatable to your audience when they see your main character and pet grew up together. Now that I know that I want my dog to be a puppy, I still need to figure out what type of dog I want you to have. After doing multiple sketches of various types of dogs, I decided to go with a Rottweiler puppy. I made him a bit more 'adorable' by adding a little bit more weight on him than your average real-life Rottweiler puppy, and gave him googly eyes that face on opposite directions. Now that we have rough character designs for both our characters, let's move on to the next video in which we'll refine our designs and see what we can do to change and make them better. See you in the next one. 5. Refining Your Character: Now let's move on to the next step in our character design process! In this video, we'll try and see what we can do to improve our characters and see if we can push their designs even further, I'll start it Brayo and I'll mostly focused on his head. For the most part, his body works for me and I don't see anything that needs changing. We'll play around the different hairstyles, facial features, and test out different head shapes. In short, we will not necessarily change the overall design of the character, but rather we will play around with different styles. If you're on social media, you'll see certain artists doing these 'Draw in your style' challenges, or other artists that pick a character from a popular show/movie, and imagine how they would look like in other different shows or movies. Here's an example I found of Keanu Reeves... Like in the exploration stage in the previous video, let's try and do as many different versions as possible in order to get the best design. For my case, I basically experimented with four new styles. Five, if you count the one that's pretty similar to the original, with a different hairstyle. In the end, I decided to retain the original design. I did not see much that needed improving. Same thing with Brayo's puppy. Now, this is just based on my decision because this is a personal project. If someone else was in charge, we would have probably gone with the second, third, or fourth style. Heck, we would have probably gone in an entirely different direction with the designs. So take note of that as you design your character. Once we are done with this process, and we are happy with our designs, let's proceed to the next step. See you in the next video. 6. Pose And Expression Tests: Once you're done refining our character, you can move on to the next step in the process. In this video, we'll be drawing poses and character expressions. This process is useful because you'll get to see if your character design works or not. And if it doesn't, you can go a step or two back and fix the flaws. We'll start by looking for some reference images that we'll use. You can also take pictures of yourself with various expressions that you may need, similar to what animators do before animating a shot. This is especially useful if you can't find what you're looking for online. In my case, I was able to find everything that I needed on the Internet. Next step is to import those reference images and start sketching your character with different expressions. In my example, I'll only do six expressions for my character 'Brayo', but I recommend that you do more in order to really push your character to be limit. Expression sheets can have upwards of 20+ expressions per character based on past projects that I've been a part of. If you work as a character designer on a show, you will also be required to come up with special poses and expressions. These special poses and expressions are categorizes a 'special' because they are unique to a particular episode on a show . From this part of the class till the end, I'll mostly focus on Brayo and not his puppy. This is because what I'm doing for Brayo can be translated to any character. I you're designing your character along with me, just make sure to maintain the same steps for each and every one of the characters that you may have for your story. Make sure to always start with extremely rough drawings and work up from there... Sometimes you'll have to do multiple roughs before you get your desired drawing. Once your roughs are good to go, we can move on to clean up! I'm personally using Sketchbook Pro as my drawing software, but this will translate to pretty much any drawing software available in the market. Turn down the transparency of your 'roughs' layer to the desired level. Then create a new layer and start drawing clean lines, Photoshop and Sketchbook Pro have features that can assist you in drawing less crooked lines but I would recommend that you use this sparingly because it hinders your growth and natural development as an artist. After you have your clean lines, move on to color. I usually start with one major color and then proceed to the rest. Once the 'Major color' has been applied to the cleanup lines, I 'lock' the color layer and then proceed to add colors to the other parts of the body, such as the eyes, mouth, shirt etc.. This 'lock' feature prevents colors from bleeding out of the edges of your character drawing. That's Brayo's expressions are done! Now, let's move on to his puppy... I was pretty happy with how he looks, but I was open to the fact that I'd probably have to go back and fix any issues that I may encounter with the design in this stage. For the most part, the design seems to work. But at this point, I'm still not sure if I'll call this 'final'. The next step in the process will let me know if this is good to go or there's still more work to do on the dog's design.. Once I have all the expressions for both of my characters, let's move on to doing character poses. I decided to draw three major poses. Number one, with the Brayo playing soccer/football. Number two, Brayo holding his dog like rafiki was holding baby Simba in The Lion King. and finally, the last one is Brayo just walking, wearing his jacket and gumboots. It's always fun to play around with different outfits and so I'll give Brayo different clothes for different poses. After completing my expression and pose tests for both of my characters, I have come to the conclusion that Brayo's puppy may still need some work. Particularly in the color and shape department, meaning I may have to change the entire dog breed in this case.. because this entails doing what I've already done in the previous videos. I'll do this off-screen for the sake of time...And that's it! Now we can move on to the next step in the process in which we'll be covering character turnarounds. See you in the next video! 7. Mouth Chart: Once we're done with our character expressions and poses, let's move on to Mouth Charts. A 'Mouth chart' is a collection of drawings, different mouth shapes that are coded with letters. The letters symbolize the sound that the mouth shape represents. As a character designer in the animation industry, you'll be expected to come up with three types of mouth charts for each character. A 'happy' mouth chart, a 'neutral' mouth chart, and finally, a 'sad' mouth chart. Mouth charts are important because they will be used by the animators and riggers in the animation production pipeline. On your screen is an example of a 2D head rig created in Toon Boom Harmony. If you're interested in knowing how to create 2D rigs, make sure to follow me for future updates. I'm planning to create something in the near future. Anyway, back to the mouth. As you can see, using my mouth charts helped me create different mouth shapes for this rig that will be useful to anyone animating it. As explained earlier, I have 'neutral' mouth shapes, 'happy' mouth and 'sad' mouth shapes that will be useful when animating the character in different moods. Here's a mouth chart that I was able to put together for 'Brayo', my main character. The main mouth shapes include, (I'll start with the consonant sounds that use the same mouth shapes), M and B, T and S, L and R and finally, F and V. The remaining mouth shapes are vowels, and they include; A, E/I, O and U, which use one mouth shape for each sound. Creating these mouth shapes for your character should be enough for you or someone else, to animate dialogue with no issues. Now it's time to move on to the next step in the process, in which we'll be covering character turnarounds! See you in the next video. 8. Character Turnarounds: Now that we have our mouth charts, Let's move on to creating character turnarounds! 'Character turnarounds' are drawings that show your character from different positions. It's basically a 360 degree view of your character, that will allow riggers and animators to know what your character looks like in the front, the three-quater front, side, three-quarter back and back views. It can be tricky to do at first, but with practice, you'll get it right eventually. Personally for me, the view that I've always struggled with is side view for some reason. A good way to ensure consistency between these different views, is to use one of the poses as a background for the rest. The frontal one is the best one to start with, but in my case, I'll start at the three-quarter frontal view. Next step is to make guidelines for different parts of the body so that everything stays level and consistent throughout the turn. These guideines will not only help the character have the same height throughout the sequence, but also maintain proportions of the different parts of your character's body. After we have our guidelines, let's reduce the opacity of our first pose and then start drawing all the other views. This part of the process pretty much feels like Key-Animation. Remember, the more you practice, the better you'll get at doing this. A couple of tricks to know when drawing character turnarounds are, number one, the front and three-quarter front poses can be reused to make the back and three-quarter back views respectively. Number two, when drawing the front and back views, you can use the symmetry tool depending on the software that you're using. I do believe that this feature is available on most, if not all drawing software. This will help you draw one side of your character without drawing the other. This is only applicable if your character is symmetrical. And that's it! We finally have a complete character ready to go! I hope that you learnt something new and that this will help you in our character design journey. In the next video, I'll be covering drawing exercises and other resources that can be useful to you as a character designer. See you in the next one. 9. Drawing Exercises: Now that we've completed our character design process, let me share some useful tips and resources that will help you improve as an artist. Number one, drawing often. This goes without saying, but one of the best ways to improve as an artist or in any other creative field, is to practice. In the beginning of the course, I recommended that before you start drawing your first character, do warm-up sketches first to help you loosen up. One exercise I like to do is to study the human anatomy. I look for human reference photos and do quick sketches of them. This helps me become a better artist by building muscle memory. Even though I'm mostly a digital artist, I enjoy doing my sketches on traditional paper and this means I own quite a lot of sketchbooks full of random sketches. Number two, books. Now, I know that reading and drawing a two very different things. I'm aware that reading a book on how to draw this or how to animate that doesn't necessarily guarantee that you'll become a better artist. At the end of the day, whatever you read needs to be put to practice and that's up to you. Some books that have personally helped me become a better artist and that I would recommend include; Number one, the 'Art of making' books. This is one way to see what it takes to put an animation project together. Not only will you see the character design process, but also how they design their props, environments, etc. Back in 2016, when I started this journey in the animation industry. I came across this animated short called 'Taking flight' by Moonbot studios on YouTube. I really enjoyed the film, but the best part was, you could download the 'Art of making taking flight' PDF for free. This gave great insight on the design process and how everything comes together in an animation production. Every major animated film pretty much has one of these books that you can buy online and use to improve your character designs.. Number two, 'Draw the DC Universe' Now, the only problem with this recommendation is that the book is pretty much for kids. I would still recommend it to you guys because I had a lot of impact on me as an artist when I was growing up. It breaks everything down and it's easy to understand for beginner artists. Before reading this book, when I was a kid, I would draw my characters from the 'outside-in' and by the end of the book, I learnt how important it is to draw my characters from the 'inside-out' by using simple lines and shapes, even though it's for kids, I'd still recommend it. And to be honest, once you're done with it, maybe you can just give it to your niece, daughter, baby brother, or any child that you know, that's into drawing. I have also heard great things about the 'Silver Way- Techniques, tips, and tutorials for effective character designs' by Stephen Silver, who is a popular Disney character designer' He is popularly known for his work on 'Kim Possible'. These just a few recommendations... There are plenty of resources out there. Do your research and see what will work best for you. And that's it guys! Remember to practice, practice and practice and more. Becoming a great artist doesn't just happen overnight. Take care. 10. Final Thoughts: Congrats! You made it to the end. First of all, I'd like to thank you for watching the entire course and I hope that I've made a positive impact in your character design journey. Look forward to more classes in the future, which we'll be covering more topics in the animation production pipeline. The big vision I have is to take you guys from the development process, to finally animating your character...As an assignment, please come up with a character or characters and take them through the entire process that I've shown you in this class. Make sure to post your final work down below with the rest of the community. I can't wait to see what you guys come up with! Also, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Also, please let me know what I can improve on by leaving a review down below. If it's the audio, my voice, How I present my thoughts... Just let me know if maybe there's something that is not clear enough.. If you want the classes to be longer. Just let me know down below and I'll work on that for future classes. Thank you and take care!