Character Design Crash Course: Designing Kids

1. Introduction: Hello, and welcome to another edition of Character Design Crash Course. My name is Melissa, and I'm a surface designer and illustrator based in Northern California. Character Design crash course is a series of illustration classes meant for beginning cartoonists or intermediate character artists looking for a refresher. In this course, I focus on how to draw kids of all ages from newborn babies to young adults. I'll go over some of my greatest inspirations. All of the different tips and tricks I use to age a character up or down. What qualities and kids make them look young and which of these qualities you can exaggerate in cartooning. Finally, I'll demonstrate my process for designing a young character. In this class, I really focus on taking the principles learned in my other courses and applying them to designing kids. That said, if you haven't taken any of my other courses, you can still start here if you'd prefer. But I do recommend checking out my dynamic design in four steps class along with this class as I go over the fundamentals of character design in more depth in that course. I'll be demonstrating in procreate, but rest assured, you can do everything I'm going to demonstrate in this class traditionally. So all you really need is a pencil and paper. So let's get to drawing. 2. What Makes a Character Look Young?: So, what makes a character look young? I think the biggest factor to consider when it comes to designing kids is proportion. You can instantly age a character up or down, depending on how you change the proportions. Basically, the younger you want your character to appear, the smaller the head to body ratio should be. Both figures look young here, but the figure on the right looks even younger than the figure on the left because the proportions are pushed just a little bit more. The body is nearly the same height as their head, and you can push it even further and make the body the exact same height as the head too. So one to one ratio instead of a one to one and one third. Both of their heads are big in proportion to their bodies, which is important as are their eyes and ears. Fun fact, after we're born, our eyes grow for the first three months after birth, and then hardly at all after that. That's why they look so big in babies and kids because they're relatively large for the size of the tiny head that they're in. Basically, when it comes to kids, big exaggerated features will go a long way towards indicating youth. The only exception is the nose. Kids noses tend to be pretty small, especially baby noses. There are certain rules of thumb or guidelines that can help you make better design choices, and they can help you get into the habit of avoiding certain design pitfalls, especially when you're a beginner. That being said, I always like to stress the fact that this is still cartooning and rules are meant to be broken within the realm of cartooning. Some rules are definitely more malleable than others. Like I said before, I know from experience that even the smallest changes in proportion can instantly age a character up or down. These guidelines are definitely here for a reason, but I just want you to try not to let these rules restrict your creativity or stop you from doing your own experimentation. One of those general rules of thumb is that soft rounded features, age characters down while sharper edged features, age characters up? I wanted to show you this character bust I do on the right though, because while it is true that rounded features can indicate a character's youthfulness, if you will. This young girl here has a sharp square jaw. To me, she could easily be like 13 or 14, maybe. Would I be able to do the same thing with a baby character? Almost definitely not. But the point still stands that experimenting and trying different things can sometimes lead to interesting, successful designs. Okay. Placement is another important factor. Even the most subtle changes in placement can affect a character's age. For example, you can lower the facial features to age of character down, like I did with the two right hand drawings of the boy. In the third drawing over, I also shortened the chin and widen the cheeks a bit. But in the middle drawing, all I did was move the features down. Larger foreheads, fuller cheeks and smaller chins will help make characters look younger. With the girl, I lowered and enlarged her head, giving her no neck, and I also raised her waist line. Just a few small adjustments can make a big difference. Placement is also important in profile view and works similarly with both complex and simple design. Okay, so I'm just going to go over some of the qualities that you can generally find within the different age groups. Infants and toddlers have larger heads, big eyes, little to no neck or chin, small noses and larger foreheads. Toddlers stand a little taller than babies and have somewhat longer bodies. But baby fat is still apparent until they're about two or three years old. From about three to five, kids start to lose their baby fat and their necks make more of an appearance. Rounder face shapes will make a character look younger as well. The oldest boy on the right here has the oval shaped head, and I think that that contributes to him looking a little bit older than the others. As kids get older, the head to body proportion steadily grows, foreheads get a little smaller, the eyes and ears are still relatively large, and cheeks and jaws can be slightly more defined. The two younger girls are about three heads tall, whereas the two older boys are about foreheads tall. The body continues to grow, torsos get longer and facial features can start to get less round and more angular. Although I don't really have a good example of that here, but I will in later slides. Kids can start to look a little bit awkward around 11 or 12. Before I move on to teenagers, I wanted to show you this character I drew a few years ago for a video game concept. I was first asked to design a young girl. No specific age range was given to me at the time, but the game was going to be about a young child's dreams. I knew she had to be pretty young. I originally drew the bust of her and then later drew her full body. But I realized after the fact that she looks older in the bust than she does in the full body drawing. This is largely due to the fact that in the full body drawing, her head to body ratio is pretty small. Her body is only about 2.5 heads tall, and also she's wearing a ones which does a lot to make her seem younger. Her face is also a little bit rounder and she seems shy and bashful. I would pin her at about nine or ten years old. In the bust, however, I think she looks about 13 because her face is a little bit longer, her neck is significantly longer, and she has a bit more attitude. She seems more assertive to me. Not that little kids can't be assertive, but I just wanted to point out how much attitude, body language, and clothing can also affect the age of a character. Moving on, Observation is so essential for character design, and it's hugely helpful when it comes to designing young people. With teenagers, proportions start evening out. You'll want to look out for puberty changes such as wider hips, smaller waists, bigger feet, and gangly limbs. The noses start to get bigger too. Ears and noses never stop growing, so their ears are also still pretty large. Like I mentioned in the last slide, clothing and body language is really important to take into account. By this age range, the head to body proportion has pretty much evened out unless you're going for a more stylized design, that is. The body is nearly fully developed with no wrinkles. You want to avoid excessive contour lines in the face as that is a quick way to age a character up significantly. Again, attitude, body language, hair styles, more angular features. These are all really important factors. Context clues like hair and clothing styles will help sell the illusion of whichever age you're going for. Okay. All right. That about covers it. You can download the slide under the Projects and Resources tab if you want to use it for reference later on. Okay. 3. Inspiration: I talked a bit about this in my dynamic design and four steps course as well. But I wanted to quickly go over it here because I think it's always just a really good reminder. I think it's really important to look to other artists for inspiration and to learn from them. The only time that I would advise against this is if you're feeling overwhelmed by looking at other artist's work and comparing your own work to it. If that is getting you down, then I would suggest backing away and taking a break from that because it's really hard not to compare yourself. Even though one of the number one pieces of advice that I give and that I've received is to try not to compare yourself to other artists because it's really never fair to do that to yourself. You don't know how long the other artist has been drawing and they most likely have a lot more experienced than you do. That's much easier said than done though. It's good to give yourself breaks from looking at everyone's gorgeous, amazing work. But overall, I do think it is extremely valuable to look to other artists for inspiration, and I say this from personal experience. I cannot tell you the number of times I've gone to Pinterest to look at reference or other people's work and it helped me get unstuck from whatever design problem I was facing. You want to analyze and study their use of shape, what makes their style consistent, what elements and stylistic choices you like and can draw from literally, all that sort you can pick up from studying other people's work. That said, it is super important to be influenced by more than one artist because you really don't want to run the risk of emulating one person's work too closely. As ideally, you want to develop a style that is uniquely your own. I still feel like I'm developing my own style and I'm not sure if I'm ever going to stop feeling that way to some degree. It takes a lot of practice, a lot of experimentation, and trying different things including styles and a lot of time, and dedication. I still feel like I'm constantly trying out different style choices. But that is okay because I have learned to embrace the process and enjoy the experimentation. I think that is something that we all have to do because the main reason we're doing this is because we enjoy it or else, why would we be doing this to ourselves? It's really hard. Now that that's been said, I want to quickly show you some of my own inspirations, people who I think draw kids specifically really well. A huge influence on me and someone I mention a lot throughout my classes, is Stephen Silver. He's a wonderful art teacher himself and so much of what I know, I've learned from him. I don't think my style is similar to his at all, but I can still see the influence in certain choices that I make. I just think that he's so good at really conveying age with shape and attitude, and clothing, etc. The next person is Shaun Bryant. I really love this line up of boy scouts and how it's super clear that they're all young. I love how the general proportions are pretty similar, like they've all got big heads in relation to their bodies, big ears, all that good stuff. But there's still so much clever variation in body shape and head shape. None of these little guys are boring to look at and no two look the same. The next artist is someone I recently discovered named Luigi Lucarelli and I just think her work is amazing. The two lineups on the top and the bottom right are the students in this magical school world. The bottom left is a lineup of some of the adult professors. I wanted to include them to compare it to the kids because I just think these are so successful conveying age across not just humanoids, but non-humanoids and animals, and rock creatures. I just love that. A lot of the things that I've been talking about are so evident here, like attitude, proportion, clothing. All of those things combine to sell you the illusion that you're looking at a child monster. I just think you can learn so much from looking at these and comparing the differences between the kids and the adults. It's just so great. I love it. I love it so much. I have two slides of his work because I also thought this was really cool, because he's got one character at different ages in her life. Looking at the differences there is really interesting and helpful. Then on the right, there's one character drawn in different styles. I think that some of these look younger than some of the others. The one on the bottom right to me looks the youngest and I think that's because of her relatively large head and the fact that she doesn't have a visible neck. Her ears are pretty large in all of them, which helps her look youthful in every version. But in the bottom right, they're even larger. Once you are able to recognize these things, you can better analyze the drawings you see and understand why these illusions are being sold to you, and hopefully apply that knowledge and understanding to your own drawings. The next artist is Claire Keane. I just love how expressive these drawings of Rapunzel are. You've got little-round pudgy baby Rapunzel. Then taller Rapunzel has almost the same head and face shape, but her body is a little longer. The next artist is Karly Jade Catto. The cat here to me seems pretty young because of her big head and large eyes, I think. It just goes to show that you can apply these same ideas to animals as well. The next is the one and only Milt Kahl. What even is there to say? His work is just amazing and so inspiring. Next is Anoosha Syed. I wanted to include a variation of styles. I think that Anoosha has such a strong, unique style. I think it's interesting that there's really not too much difference proportionally between the infants and the older kids. The bodies of the older kids are just a little bit longer maybe and a little bit less rounded. I think the main indicator of age difference is in their clothing though. That's something to keep in mind. Sometimes, it's as simple as that. Then the cats here to me, look like teenagers, largely because of their attitudes and clothing. Although honestly, I would wear both of those outfits. The final artist I want to show you is Ryner Alencar. Look at the difference between what looks to me like nine to 11-year-olds, give or take, versus the other kids who look about 13-16, maybe. The differences are pretty subtle honestly, but they're there. I think for the most part, the teenagers are a little bit longer, taller. Some of them are a little bit ganglia, more awkward proportions. It can be hard to spot, but they're there if you look hard enough. These are just a few of the countless other artists that I'm inspired by. But hopefully, they've got you feeling inspired and ready to jump into creating some drawings of your own. 4. Drawing a Baby: I wanted to include two drawing demos, one of a baby for this class because drawing infants, it's not that it's a different process necessarily, but it comes with its own special set of design requirements or not so much requirements, but parameters, I suppose. It has its own unique challenges. More so than any other young age range, I think. You can't go to draw a baby in the same way that you'd go to draw an eight year old or a 15 year old. And I think the differences are a little more drastic or obvious, I guess. And I think it's important to go over them in a little bit more depth. Okay. As with anything, I always try to start out with the simple basic shapes first, using them as building blocks for the overall shape of my character. I start with the head. Then for babies, I like to really emphasize their baby fat. I use a pair shape to build out the torso and belly. I have a bit of a tendency to move ahead to rendering my shapes a little bit more than is necessary in the beginning, which I really shouldn't do because I tend to have to make proportion fixes down the line. You really want to try to stick to rough simple shapes at first until you have a solid underdrawing. In my other character design crash courses, I talk about the practice of using straights against curves and avoiding what I call the sausage man. As generally, when it comes to building a character, it's much more visually appealing to have straight lines and curved lines next to each other or across from each other. But here, I've put that role aside and I've done just the opposite, and I've created sausage link shaped legs. It's appropriate for a baby because they basically have what look like little sausage link shaped legs because of their tiny pudgy cute limbs. But again, you'd usually want to avoid this look, particularly in arms and legs. Once you're happy with the overall shape and proportions, you can move on to the more detailed, careful over sketch. A little tiny oval for the nose and a teeny tiny mouth. I've drawn the eyes huge and fairly wide apart. The wider apart, the cuter it is, I find. Here, I lowered the facial features before rendering them more because again, lowering the features ages characters down, and that includes the ears as well, which I ended up lowering later on. I also noticed that the head felt just a little bit big to me, so I adjusted that as well. Here's a little trick I use for eyes sometimes. I'll draw a diagonal line from the corner of the eye I've already drawn over to the other side of the face, and that gives me a better idea of where I should draw the corner of the other eye. This doesn't always work. It depends on what style of eyes you're drawing, really. You might already have a guideline there to help you with that placement anyway. But it helps me sometimes. The eyes in this drawing nicely lined up now. However, they are not symmetrical or identical. And they do not need to be. In fact, I would encourage you to try not to draw perfectly symmetrical faces as asymmetry adds character, and most people have asymmetrical features anyway. As you can see, this baby's body is about a head and three quarters tall or short. Like I mentioned before, you can push the proportions here even further. The baby's body could be the same length as the head even. Maybe you're drawing a newborn baby or maybe you're just going for super stylized and exaggerated design. Something that's really interesting is that you can take some of these ideas and apply them to other animals. I don't actually draw cartoon baby animals very often. This was a little bit of a challenge for me. But I saw the amazing incredible Aaron Blaze do this once in either one of his online classes or in a live demo that he did. I can't remember. But essentially, he took a basic baby's face. And then with a few simple changes, turned it into another animal. I can't remember what animal he drew, but mine turned into a bear. Essentially, I just took the lowered features, large forehead, the wide apart eyes, and the small chin of the baby and applied them to what I think is a cute bear cub. Then just for fun, I turned it into a kitten, too. 5. Drawing a Teenager: I almost always like to start with some story or personality when I go to design a character. It doesn't have to be a super complex thought out backstory or anything like that. But I find that even just jotting down a few characteristics or traits gives me direction and ultimately makes my character stronger. Sometimes I'll write down a list of traits that I know I want my character to possess. I didn't plan what I wanted to draw for this demo, so just off the top of my head, I think I'd like to draw a girl today. I want her to be maybe 13 or 14. Let's make her nerdy or bookish, friendly. And let's say she is a bit of a day dreamer. Already, just the small list is giving me ideas for how I want her to look, what her expression and pose could be, etcetera. I go into a lot of depth about story and research and how you can approach different character design projects in my dynamic design and four steps course. If you're interested in hearing more of my rambling about that, go check it out. Actually, I go into more depth on each step of the process of designing a character in that class as well. I try not to be overly repetitive in these courses unless it's something that I think needs to be said multiple times. But yeah, I am streamlining my process in this course because I don't want to bore those of you who have taken my other courses. Anyway, after I've written down some traits and established the type of person I want to design. I sometimes will draw some quick little silhouettes to both warm up and figure out a general shape for my character. Honestly, in this instance, this step didn't really help me figure that out, which that's fine. Sometimes it's more or less helpful depending on the character and level of stylization or exaggeration that you're going for. So anyway, I've moved on to slightly more complex body shape ideas, and I never skip this step. I always start with simple built out or three D shapes to create the form of the character, no matter how simplistic a style I'm going for. Even if I know it's going to be flat colors with very little rendering. I still build out my forms at this stage because it really does help make your design stronger in the end. I'd like to try out a few different ideas. If you want to work in animation or video games or anything like that that would require character design, you'll want to get into the habit of creating multiple ideas for one character. As far as my experience in the industry goes, it's fairly limited. I've only ever interned at a video game company once, and I'm not pursuing character design as a professional career anymore. Unless you count these classes, which I guess they do count. Anyway, based on my experience and the advice that I've heard from other character designers, art directors and creative directors really like to see that you're capable of presenting multiple ideas for one character. I think it would be nothing but helpful to have something like that in your portfolio. Anyway, the more ideas you try, the more likely you are to land on something unexpected and awesome. The more you experiment, the more likely it is that your design will be that much stronger. In this case, I actually think I liked the first one I drew the most. I think I'm going to go with that, sometimes that happens. But either way, now I have these other ideas that I can use as starting points for other characters, perhaps. Because this girl is bookish, I decided that she should be carrying some books naturally. Because my foundational drawing of her was so proportionally strong and built out pretty well, I was able to build more detail on top of it with a surprising amount of ease. I'm not going to lie. Usually, it's more of a struggle for me. That said, I did find some reference on Pinterest and Google to help me with the posing, which I had up on my computer monitor while I was drawing this. I particularly needed reference for her arms and how she's holding the books in front of her. That was challenging to get right. This wasn't coming purely from my mind. I still frequently need reference for full body poses. The more I draw, the easier it becomes, the more shortcuts I can take for sure, but I still struggle with most poses. So if you can relate to that, it's totally normal. I think people are the most challenging thing to draw, whether they're super cartoony and simplified or not. Go easy on yourself and remember that this takes practice, persistence and a lot of patients. I think I got that from Stephen Silver originally. I think he called it the three Ps, practice persistence in patients. Very helpful to remember and constantly remind yourself of. I decided to draw her looking up toward the sky because she's a day dreamer, remember, so I wanted to give her an expression that implies that she's, you know, maybe lost in thought or far away. A technique I like to use for neat digital line work is to draw my lines quickly, sometimes many times until I get it right, and then erase where the lines cross over. This works pretty well for me and it ensures that my lines are clean and crisp and not wobbly. I talk about this technique a little bit more throughout my character design crash course series, including in my caricature class. There's a video in that class in which I demonstrate how to arcature or cartoon a live action fictional character in full from design to color. If you're not particularly interested in traditional carcature, you can skip the videos in which I demo traditional charcature and just watch the surrounding videos. Caricature and character design go hand in hand, and I think it's important to learn about carcature as it will only help you become a stronger character designer. Caricature isn't just exaggerating a celebrity or someone at an amusement parks face. It's also taking characters from a live action movie or TV show and turning them into cartoons, and then taking that knowledge and applying it to your own original characters. When I stood back from the drawing, I realized that this girl looks closer to 16 or 17 than 13 or 14 years old. This wasn't my original plan, but I thought that I would use this as a teaching opportunity and show you another example of what you could do to Dag character. The things that make her seem older to me are her long legs and the width of her hips, or I guess the fact that she has a small waist. However, you want to look at it. Naturally, I shortened her legs, including the skirt and widened her waist just a bit so that she has less of an hourglass figure. I think she looks much more like the cute, slightly awkward daydreaming 13 or 14 year old I was aiming for now. All it took to do that was a couple of minor tweaks. This is a lot easier with digital art, of course, but remember that you can still use tracing paper or a light board in a similar way with traditional art. That is that. I decided not to go over color in this class as one, I don't consider myself a particularly proficient color artist, and also because I do demonstrate techniques for coloring in some of my other classes. If you're interested in seeing how I color things, then go ahead and check those out. 6. Thank You + Class Project: Your assignment is unsurprisingly, to create a young character of your own and post it as a class project. As an optional challenge, try drawing two or three kids of differing ages. I will be happy to provide whatever constructive feedback I can on it. I call this series Character Design crash course because these classes really only scratch the surface of what you can learn when it comes to character design. But I try to pack in as much information as I can in a short format. Hence crash course. I periodically release new character design crash courses that cover a range of specified subjects all relating to character design and illustration. If you enjoyed this class, and want to stay up to date on 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 Design to see my latest works in progress and or sign up for my quarterly newsletter. I also recommend some additional resources, including some other Skillshare classes on character illustration, which I've linked to under the Projects and Resources tab. So be sure to check those out. While I do believe that my courses are beneficial to both intermediate and beginning character artists. I also know that character design can be really challenging, especially for beginners. So I urge you to approach your work with the mindset that you may not create something amazing on the first go, or it may not look how you want it to look. Drawing people is very challenging, and it takes a lot of consistent practice and dedication to master it. So as always, try not to be discouraged if you're not happy with your results at first. Let yourself improve at your own pace. My motto on Skillshare and in life in general is allow yourself to fail before you succeed. Allow yourself to create bad drawings and learn to appreciate their worth so that you can get to the good drawings. On that note, I wish you the best of luck, and as ever, I cannot wait to see what you create.