Character Design Crash Course: Characters for Surface Pattern Design

1. Introduction: Hi and welcome to another edition of Character Design Crash Course. These time I'll be focusing on characters for surface pattern design. My name is Melissa Lee and I'm a designer and illustrator based in Northern California. Character Design Crash Course is a series of illustration classes, each of which is designed to teach a small subset of character design. In this class, I'll cover things to consider when designing characters specifically for surface patterns. I'll demonstrate how simple changes can alter the expression and feel the character. I'll share my tips for creating successful characters for both repeat patterns and placement prints that can be applied to a variety of different products and a variety of different markets. I'll also demonstrate my personal process for creating a repeat pattern tile and Adobe Photoshop. A basic understanding of Photoshop is recommended but not absolutely necessary. As I will take you step-by-step through each process. Character design can be a really useful skill to have for a surface pattern designer. Especially if you want your work to appeal to the children's market. I've said, there are many applications for character art in the adult markets as well. No matter who you want your work to appeal to, experimenting with characters can be really beneficial, and knowing how to create technical repeat patterns will give you a definite leg up in the design industry. Let's get started and make some characters. 2. Designing Characters for Surface Patterns: Before we get to the demonstrations, I wanted to talk a little bit about creating successful characters, specifically for surface pattern design. If you're familiar with the design industry, or even if you've just been using Skillshare for any significant amount of time, you're probably already aware of what surface pattern design is. But for those of you who aren't familiar with it, surface pattern design is essentially a broad term that encompasses any design work that is meant for print on a surface, whether it be fabrics and textiles, home goods, or paper products. Basically almost any surface that you can think of, patterns can be applied to. When it comes to print, designs generally fall into two categories, placement prints and repeat patterns. Placement prints are standalone designs such as a single image or block of text that do not repeat. This is usually what you'd see on a graphic t-shirt or a greeting card, for example. By the way, just so you know, everything that's uncredited in this slide is my work. Moving on, repeat patterns are created by designing a tile or square, which as the name suggests, can be repeated endlessly next to itself to create a seamless overall pattern. The actual square that holds your design is called the repeat or repeat tile. As I mentioned before, knowing how to create technical repeats will definitely give you a leg up in the industry. When it comes to characters, there's a few specific things to keep in mind while designing them for surface patterns. The first is that characters with a lot of detail can look really visually overwhelming in a repeating pattern. So if you like to be super detailed and implement a lot of line work, gradients or tonal elements, just try to do so sparingly, or make sure that your detailed characters are spaced out more. The next thing to keep in mind is that you want your characters to be clear, so it's important to create easy to read features in the face and body. You want to make sure that a leg can't be confused for a tail, or a nose can't be confused for a mouth, stuff like that. Lastly, you want to make sure that the attitude of the characters you're creating are fitting for whatever product surface or market you want to sell to or license with. You want to convey a sense of personality and emotion. So if you're creating characters for the children's market, you generally want them to be charming, colorful, and cute. On the other hand, if you're creating characters for, say, an adult wallpaper design or bedding, then you may want to make them more sophisticated or elegant with a softer, more minimal color palette. Just as a side note, I know she's more well-known for her florals, but I really love Elizabeth Olwen's character art. Her style, I think, perfectly emphasizes the sophisticated character design that appeals more to adult markets. It's still very stylized and graphic, but really elegant. There's just sophistication to it that you wouldn't often see in the children's market, I don't think. The styles you see more often on children's products are more hand-drawn and whimsical. Just to be clear, I love both more childlike styles, if you will, and more sophisticated styles. I don't think one is better than the other by any means, I just want you to be aware of what designs appeal more to certain markets. The general rule when it comes to color, as I briefly mentioned, is that bright and bold appeals to kids and teenagers, whereas softer and sophisticated appeals to adults, but there are no hard and fast rules. In fact, there are plenty of exceptions to the rules. Look at how bright and colorful the parrot design is, for example. Jessica Swift's mermaids, you hear mermaid and you'd think that it'd be for kids, but to me, her design totally appeals to the adult market, as shown in the handbag that the fabric was used for. More and more lately, cutesy designs are appealing to more adult customers, especially in fashion, I think. I, for one, own a lot of patterned clothing with really cute characters and I'm nearing 30. It really depends on what companies you're interested in working with, what products you want your work to be printed on, and who you want your work to appeal to. I think these stylized ladies by Karen Vermeulen, apologies if I pronounced that wrong, but I think that these could appeal to both kids and adults. In conclusion, don't let these ideas restrict you. Just be aware that your colorful, smiling dinosaurs pattern will most likely appeal more often to companies that sell children's products. Moving on to the demonstration. 3. Expression: In this video, I'm going to demonstrate how simple changes in expression and placement of the features can alter a design, even in the most simple of styles. The head and face is a hugely important element of your character, as this is where you can convey the most emotion and attitude. When I start building the face, I consider how the positioning of the eyes, nose, and mouth can play into the personality of that character. You'll want to play with different shapes, sizes, facial expressions, and levels of exaggeration or simplification. I decided to start with a very simple bunny head shape and then build on top of that. In this case, I'm going for a design that's quite simplistic and stylized. There's not a lot of complexity, so I don't need to go to the trouble of considering realistic proportions and all that. I can really play around with shape and size and different types of features. It's easiest to do this brainstorming step in a sketchbook before you bring it into Photoshop or Illustrator. But for the sake of demonstration, I'm going to show you a bunch of different cleaned up examples. Anyway, first of all, I've got this simple bunny head shape, and I like to start with the eyes. How large or small you draw the eyes and how far or close you place them makes a big difference in the emotion or feeling of the character. Here I have curved up happy eyes and hear curved down sleepy eyes. Even just the simplest lines drawn slightly differently can convey very different feelings. The third bunny I gave big round eyes, and then I gave this one smaller, oval shaped eyes, and I also place them further down on the face. Another set of big round eyes, and lastly, medium-sized eyes with smaller pupils. Next is the nose and mouth. For bunny number one, I created a small snout with an inverted triangle nose and it's placed higher up on the face. Bunny number two has a similar small nose, but this time it's an oval shape and the snout is longer because I just wanted to see how that would look compared to the smaller snout. For bunny number three, I created a small round inverted triangle nose and a happy open mouth. For bunny number four, similar only this time it's a frowny face, and I made sure to put the nose lower down on the face because it would have looked odd being above the eyes. For bunny number five, I decided to try a more typical funny nose, but the mouth is straight and more neutral looking. Lastly, bunny number six has a heart-shaped nose, and I decided to give her a oval shape mouth to support the surprised look of her eyes. Now for the best part, which is the addition of all the fun little details that can really level up your designed. So for bunny number one, got these cute little blush marks on her cheeks and some whiskers. Bunny number two is similar, only I was playing around with drawing the whiskers differently and the brush marks are a little bigger. Bunny number three, I gave a tongue and freckles. Bunny number four, to emphasize the sad face, I gave her inverted eyebrows and a little teardrop. Bunny number five is pretty simple but cute. Lastly, bunny number six, I also gave her tongue and some different whiskers and a cool strike. I was really just playing around with different things I can do what I liked best, to put a little details I thought looked best. I like to try for example, drying the whiskers differently and seeing which one I think is cutest. Something else I tried was on a bunny number three, first I gave her these big blush marks, but because they're the same size, almost about the same size as her eyes. It's not very appealing to me because it's just two at the same shape stack on top of each other, and that just doesn't create very much interest to me so I decided to replace them with freckles and I think that looks much better. I talk a lot about avoiding the bowling ball effect in my other character design classes. Essentially what that means is having eyes and a nose and a mouth that are all the same size and all like a similar shape. A bowling ball has three holes that are all the same size, then it's not very interesting to look at. So if you make the eyes and the mouth, or the eyes and the nose a similar size, it's not super interesting to look at. So trying to play around with varying the size and shape of the features on the face adds a lot more interest. That even applies to the simplest of designs, the simplest of drawing styles. Even with simple designs, little alterations here and there can completely change the expression of your character. I just think it's really fun to experiment with different features. Sometimes I'll land on something I really like that I wouldn't have gotten to if I just stuck with my first initial idea. Again, you can do this in a sketchbook before hand if that's easiest for you. I just wanted to show you these cleaned up examples. So with that, let's move on to the next video where I go a bit into body shape. 4. Body: When you're creating an animal character, you'll need to decide if you want the character to be a bit more realistic or more anthropomorphic, which basically means having the characteristics of humans. So will it have clothing? Will it be standing upright on two legs? Stuff like that. First of all, here I have drawn a more traditional bunny body shape, and I've created a scene around this bunny, of these cute little flowers and a sun, and it's quite pleasant, and this first expression really fits with this scene because she looks happy and she's just enjoying the atmosphere. I'm going to flip through the expressions that I made and we'll see which ones fit and which ones don't. I think this one fits pretty good, this one's adorable as well. Now the poor little sad bunny doesn't really fit into the scene because it's a happy pleasant scene. It doesn't feel right to me to have this sad bunny in this scene. This guy doesn't quite fit either, he seems a little suspicious or maybe he does fit, I don't know he's like suspicious of that bee, funnily enough even though I didn't mean to, looks like he's ironic. I guess it just depends on what you're going for. This one definitely doesn't fit in my opinion because it does not look happy to be there, he's surprised and it's just weird that the scene around him is so pleasant and lovely and he look shocked. So you just want to keep that in mind. This all sounds really obvious that obviously if you're trying to make a pleasant scene and you wouldn't make your character look sad and you wouldn't necessarily make them look surprised, but a lot of beginning character artists sometimes don't put enough emphasis or focus on the expression of their characters. Sometimes that can result in incongruous scenes or they didn't realize that the expression was coming off one way. So you just want to be aware of how different things look. This is just to point out that you want to be aware of that and to look out for it, because you want to get across the emotion that you're trying to get across. Anyway I'm going to go back to this one because I think that's the best, it's super cute. Something else I wanted to mention about using graphic flat colors. It can be beneficial for surface pattern design, not just because too much detail can make your repeating patterns look visually overwhelming, but also because it can open up your work to a lot of different markets. So for example, some fabric companies can only print so many colors at once. A lot of them are more traditional and don't use digital printing like does [inaudible] , so if you had a design with gradients or different opacities, then it couldn't be printed by a lot of those companies. So it might be difficult to sell your work or license with those companies, this is to say that you shouldn't ever do this because there are a ton of industries that totally can print watercolor patterns and gradients and opacity changes and all that good stuff. It's just that you should be aware of the restrictions that some industries have. Just for fun, here is one more example. This bunny has a more anthropomorphized body, and she looks like a little hipster. Let's just flip through the expressions, even though I think you get the picture by now, but this one's pretty cute. This one's adorable. Something bad could happen at someone's birthday, maybe this is fitting but depends on what you're going for. I like this suspicious guy. I just don't know if he quite fits here. Lastly, I guess something could have happened at the birthday party that she was surprised by, maybe she lost a balloon, I don't know. Anyway I'm going to go back. This one's really cute. For this scene in particular, I purposefully picked colors that I feel are viewed as gender-neutral. I'm the type of person who doesn't love the idea of colors being gendered, let's just put it that way, but I won't go into it because this isn't a gender studies class, and I'm sure nobody wants to listen to me harp on about this. Anyway I personally don't really consider it too much when I'm designing for kids or, I do consider it, but I often like to try to choose colors that are within the gender-neutral spectrum, because I like the idea of my work appealing to as many kids as possible and as many parents who are buying the products for their kids as possible. Also I do just tend to be drawn to those colors anyway, but your mileage may vary, so color and what kids you're trying to appeal to is something that you may want to consider. What I am essentially trying to convey here is that there are a lot of different things that you can do, even with the simplest of designs, to create variation and to create expression and to convey a feeling in your illustration. So next up I'm going to demonstrate how I personally create repeating pattern tiles in Photoshop. 5. Creating a Repeat Tile in Photoshop: First of all, I painted these bunnies with water colors, and then I scanned them onto my computer at 300 DPI and opened it up in Adobe Photoshop CC. The technique I used to remove the background from my traditional art is something that I don't see demonstrated a lot. I use alpha channels, and the first thing you want to do when you are using this technique is to make sure that the background is as white as possible because that makes it easier to remove. The scan was actually already really clean. I didn't really have to brighten the background, and that's because I was careful with my painting. I made sure that all the white around the bunnies was as clean as I could get it so that I didn't have to worry about editing it too much. But if you need to clean your background, you can create a Levels Adjustment layer down here at the bottom of the Layers panel, and then you can click the little white eyedropper and click on the background or the white area of your scan. It's not doing anything to mine because it's already very white, but it will help brighten yours more if you need it. I'm just going to delete this layer. Before going into channels, you need to duplicate your scan layer. Command J to duplicate it, and then hit Shift, Command, U or Shift, Control, U if you're on a PC to desaturate that new duplicated layer. This needs to be as dark as you can get it basically, you should create a levels layer. This time click the black eye dropper tool and click within the artwork and not the background, and then you can click it again to darken it even more. Now that we have that, I'm just going to merge the Adjustment Layer and the desaturated skin layer by selecting both of them and clicking Command E or right-clicking and selecting merge layers. Make sure you've selected the desaturated layer and hit Command A to select the entire canvas, then hit Command C to copy it. Then over here where the layers tab is, there's a channels tab right next to it. You'll click on the channels tab, and you'll see the RGB, red, green, blue. You'll want to add a layer, or rather a channel layer, just like you would add a regular layer. It's the same exact button down here at the bottom, and it will automatically be named Alpha one. Then, you'll want to hit Command V for paste and Command I to inverse your pasted artwork. This alpha channel will essentially become a very precise selection. Pure black pixels can't be selected, only gray and white pixels can be selected, that's why I inverse the black and white because I want to select the bunnies. That's also why I made a black and white copy of the scan because this technique only works with black and white pixels. Then you'll go back to your layers, hit your layers tab. You can delete the black and white scan layer that you made because you don't need it anymore. Then go to Select, Load Selection, and in the channels drop-down menu, there will be an option to click Alpha one. You select Alpha one and click okay. Now it has made a close to perfect selection of your artwork. Make sure you are selected on your color scan layer and click Command J to duplicate your selection. Now, you have a duplicated version of just this selection, just the bunnies or just whatever motif you have and there's no background. Sometimes I'll do this and it will come out more translucent than I want it to be, and that's if I didn't make it super black to begin with. All you have to do in that case is duplicate the layer a few more times and then merge them all together and that usually takes care of that problem. Another thing you could do is create a new blank layer, go to Select, Load Selection, select Alpha one again, and then with your paint bucket tool, you can pick a color and fill in your selection. This works really well for line work. But when it comes to watercolors or anything with multiple colors that you want to preserve, you'll want to use the first technique where you basically just cut your artwork out from the original scan. But it does work really well for traditional line art that you want to preserve, and it's a technique I use all the time. I've included two sets of instructions on how to do this in PDFs under the Your Project tab that you can download so that you don't have to come back and watch this video when you inevitably forget all the steps because it's a little complicated to learn at first. I actually already separated all of these bunnies from each other. I just used the Lasso tool to draw around each bunny and then cut them out and put them into their own separate layers. I'm just going to select one and drag it over into my sample document. I have these guidelines here, and the square in the middle is actually my repeat tile. I've expanded the canvas out so that I can see what I'm doing rather than just having a square and having the motifs fall off like this. I prefer to see what I'm working with. There's a couple of different ways that you can build a repeat tile document like this in Photoshop. But I'm going to show you the way that I do it. Actually first though, I want to show you how you can change the color of your guidelines. You just go to Photoshop CC at the top, and Preferences and Guides, Grids and Slices. Up here is the Guides menu at the top, and in the canvas drop down, you can change the color from the default cyan to whatever color you want. Just depends on your background color really, and then click ''OK''. Go to File and New to create a new document. You can do this at whatever square size that you want. I like to start at 15 by 15 inches at 300 DPI or pixels per inch. Because I like it to be nice and big, and that way it will pretty much be big enough to print it whatever size I want. You can do ten by ten or eight by eight and probably be fine, but I like to start at 15 by 15. Repeat tiles don't actually have to be squares. They can be rectangles as well. I just like to work with squares most often. Then, if you have your rulers turned on, you can just click and drag on the ruler and slide a guide over, but if you don't, you can go to View and make sure that Rulers is checked, then you slide a guide out. Here let me just zoom out a bit. You slide guide out and it will click easily to the edge and you want to line the guide up with each edge. Then I go to Image, Canvas Size and I bump it up to 20 by 20 inches. It just depends on how much room you want around the edges, but this is how I usually do it, and there's plenty of room. I don't like the background being this stark white, I'm going to go back here and grab this nice off-white cream color. Hit G for the paint bucket tool and fill it in. Now I'm ready to build my pattern. Because I like how the bunnies are positioned here already, I'm just going to select all of them and drag them over to my new document, or, instead of dragging them, you could always right-click on the selected layers and click Duplicate Layers and select the new document you've created. The first thing that you need to know about creating a repeat pattern tile is that everything that crosses the top, needs to be duplicated down to the bottom exactly, and everything that crosses one side needs to be duplicated to the other side exactly. Since I know that my tile is 15 by 15, I need to duplicate this bunny over by 15 inches. To do that, select the motif, and I can select the bunny because up here on the left I have Auto-Select checked, which makes it so that I can just click on a motif and select it. Anyway, then I hit Command J to duplicate it. Then with the duplicated layer selected, hit Command T for transform, you can see the bounding box, and be sure to duplicate it before hitting transform. If you hit Command T and then try to hit Command J, it won't let you, hit Command J to duplicate it, and then hit Command T to transform. Then once you have it set to transform, go up here, and this menu bar at the top, you'll see the X and Y. If you click the triangle in between them, it will bring them down to zero. Then because I want to move the bunny across the X axis, I will click into the X and type in 15 inches. The copied bunny has now moved over 15 inches. I can hit Enter on my keyboard and then Enter once again. Hitting Enter twice applies the transformation. Now this bunny has been duplicated perfectly across. I'll need to do the same thing with the bunnies here across the top, so select both of them, hit Command J to duplicate, Command T for transform. This time I'm copying down across the X-axis, so I'll go up to the Y and type in 15 inches and enter twice. As you can see, this one's foot is budging up against this one's ear, I'll need to move it a bit. Say you have a motif down at the bottom and you want to copy it up to the top. Selected Command J to copy Command T for transform. Instead of typing in 15 inches on the y-axis, you have to type minus 15 so that it goes up; which is the opposite of a math graph. Unfortunately, on a graph, negative would be going down obviously, but in Photoshop in Illustrator it's up. So if I wanted to copy this bunny on the right, over to the left, I would hit "Minus 15." So negative is left, positive is right, negative is up, and positive is down. Up and down is a little confusing, but you get used to it pretty quickly. Especially when you're building a pattern, you have to do this a ton of time. So it may seem confusing now, but you'll get the hang of it. So yeah, the most important thing you have to remember is that everything needs to be copied across perfectly. So if you need to move something that's already copied across or down; say, I need to move this bunny here, I need to select this bunny at the bottom as well and move both of them. If you forget to do that, just delete one of them and recopy the newly moved motif across or down again. So I'm just going to continue working on this until the whole space is filled. You have complete freedom with the middle space. You can fill it however you want, it just anything that crosses the guidelines that needs to be copied across. Don't be like me and forget to save your document until you've already worked on it for a half an hour. As soon as you create your document, save it, and then continue to save it as you work. Command or Control S is your very best friend. So now I've got all of my motifs where I want them, or at least I'm pretty sure. So I'm going to test my tile. What I do is I select the Rectangular Marquee Tool and you can hit "M" on your keyboard to select it, and then I drag it along the guides to select the 15 by 15 square. The guides make it really easy to select because they just snaps to the guides automatically. As you can see on the bottom right, it says that the selection is 15 by 15. Then once you've done that, go to Edit and Define Pattern. You can name it if you want to; I usually don't because it's just not super necessary but you can if you want. I'm going to create a new document to test this. I'm going to apply an effect, so the layer needs to be filled in with a color for this to work because you're applying an effect to something. So if it was blank, you couldn't apply it to anything. So because this layer is filled in with white, it'll work. Go to the FX menu at the bottom of the layers panel or the effects menu and select Pattern Overlay. Oh, interesting. It's applying the last pattern I made automatically, but I don't want that, so I'm going to select the latest one at the bottom. It will always put the last one that you saved at the bottom. So then you can play with the scale slider. This is just a really easy way to make sure that your pattern is working. It helps you see any mistakes you've made, and then you can just go back to your repeat tile document and edit them. I see a couple of things in here that aren't quite working well, so I'm going to play around with the positioning of these motifs a bit more and come back, and just do it again. Once I've gotten my squirrel to a point I am happy with, I often like to delete everything that crosses the bottom and recopy everything from the top-down, and then delete everything from the right side and recopy it from the left to the right. In that way I know for sure that everything is perfectly copied. So I've rearranged the motifs a bit and I'm going to test it again. So once again I'll go to Edit, Define Pattern. Go back to the test doc I created and then I can just double-click on "Pattern Overlay," here, and It'll open the Layer Style menu. I'll select the new pattern; that is much better. I like that there aren't any big open white spaces anymore. Oh yeah, and you can also click and drag on the canvas to move the pattern around. To create a perfect tile JPEG that you can upload to a print on demand site, like Spoon Flower or Society Six, select the Marquee Tool again and select the 15 by 15 square. Then select the Crop Tool and double-click to apply the crop. Then go to File and Save As. Be sure to hit "Save As" or hit Shift Command S on your keyboard, find the folder you want to save it in and save it as a JPEG or a PNG or whatever you prefer. Then once that's done, I just undo the crop or by hitting "Command Z," and re-saving my PSD file. You may want to save your PSD file before you crop it, and then once you crop it, be sure to save as a JPEG. So basically make sure that you've saved it as a JPEG and you've saved it as an uncropped Photoshop file. It may seem a little risky to do it this way but as long as you're careful, it's fine. If you want to be really careful, you can always create a second separate document and crop that document. But I always just crop it, save it as a JPEG and then immediately reverted back to it's pre-cropped form, and that works fine for me. So now I have a perfect repeating tile and I'll just open it up. There you go. That is how I like to create repeating tiles in Adobe Photoshop. 6. Closing Thoughts: Your project is to create a cute animal character suitable for the children's market. It's up to you whether you want to use it any placement print or technical repeat. I call this series character design crash course. Because these classes really only scratched the surface of what you can learn when it comes to character design. If you want to learn more, please check out my other classes in this series. I'll take you through my entire process for designing human and animal characters and go into a lot more detail about the fundamentals of character design. If you enjoyed this class, please leave me a thumbs up. Positive reviews help other students see that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you want to stay up to date with what I'm posting, be sure to hit the Follow button and you'll be the first to know when each new crash course is launched. You can also follow me on Instagram at Melissa Lee designed to see my latest works in progress. Thanks so much for watching, and I can't wait to see what characters you create.