Character Design Fundamentals Part 1: Shape Language and Basic Construction

1. Class Intro: Who doesn't love a good character design, who isn't thrilled by a character on-screen who is captivating visually and who really connects with the viewer on an emotional level. The impact your designs can have on others is something truly unique and special. Almost like a superpower. Designing a character is fun and exciting, but it can also feel a little daunting if you haven't been taught the fundamental laws of good character design. Welcome to the character design fundamental series. My name is Emma Gillette and I am a full-time freelance illustrator with experienced in the Illustration and Animation industries. I have a BFA in animation and art directed the student Emmy nominated short film tie G2. I have been a full-time freelance illustrator for almost five years. And my clients include Disney, random penguin house, and American girl among many others. In this three class series, I'll be helping you level up your character design skills by teaching you all the things that I learned in art school. First in this class you'll be learning basic construction and shape language. And the next class, you'll be learning how to put those designs into expressive and dynamic poses and gestures. And lastly, the third class, you will be learning how to take your designs to finish and polish them off with color and line work. These fundamentals are tools of the trade that every experience designer knows by heart. And soon you will too. In this first-class of my fundamental series, you will be learning basic construction in shape language. This is probably the most foundational and important aspect for good character design. Learning to speak this language is going to help you take your designs from chaotic and confusing to streamlined and meaningful. I'm going to show you how you can use basic shapes and smart proportions, unique and interesting stories with your character designs, I want to show you how using this language can easily and effectively tell compelling stories. Today's class project is to design two characters, a protagonist and an antagonist, a hero and a villain. By the end of this class, you will be better equipped with the tools necessary to create compelling characters that have interesting stories simply through their design. If you are starting out on your design journey, or even if you're just looking to brush up on your basic skills. This is the class for you as you consistently apply these techniques and fundamental lessons that I'm about to teach you, you will see consistent growth. Every new project that you start. And when you look back on your designs before this class, you will see a huge difference. I am so excited to see what characters you come up with for this class. So let's get started. 2. Your Project: At the end of this class, you will demonstrate your knowledge of the principles of construction and basic shape language. You will design two characters that are contrasting, a hero and a villain, or a protagonist and an antagonist. If you understand the class material, you will be able to smartly pick proportions and shapes for each character, so that the viewer will instantly know which character is the hero, in which character is the villain. And if you go above and beyond, the viewer will also be able to tell the basic story and personality of each character. For this class, I encourage you to draw your characters in a static pose, which also means a passive or standing pose in a front or three-quarters angle. In the next classes of my fundamental series, you will be learning how to put your designs into fun and expressive poses, and then how to finish those drawings with lighter in color. So go ahead and leave your design sketchy for the most part. I will be using the gesture brush from the retro max pack on Procreate. But you can use any brush or medium that works for you. Lastly, your assignment will include a image with your characters broken down into their basic shapes and a ladder character comparison model. If you don't quite know what I'm talking about yet, don't worry, we will be covering these in the class when you have finished your project, I would love for you to post it in the class project gallery below. Or if you're looking for critique, you can post any preliminary designs in the discussions tab. Receiving critique is the fastest way to grow as an artist, especially if you receive it graciously. So please don't be shy in asking for critique for me. I would love to help you. Also if you share your designs on social media, please tag me in it. Here's my handle. It's the same for Instagram and Twitter. You can follow me on those platforms to if you're interested in seeing my professional and personal work, I'm also available to give critique over on those platforms and my DMs as well. 3. The Human Brain and Images: Before diving into the principles of good character design, there's something very important that we need to touch on first to create great designs. We first need to understand the human brain and how it responds to and interprets images. Now you probably already know a little bit about how the human eye works. But if you don't, here's a little refresher. Light bounces around off all of the surfaces around us. And when it hits the back of your eye, also called the retina, your brain then has to interpret that light that it receives. The interpretation of that light is where the magic begins. Our human biology predisposes us to react a very specific way to certain colors and certain shapes. For example, do you ever find yourself looking for faces and random objects like the bark of a tree or the clouds in the sky. This is a response written into our DNA from the caveman days when being able to notice the face of a leopard and a bush could mean life or death. Because of this, certain shapes and certain colors evoke feelings of either safety and comfort or danger and fear. Good character design takes advantage of these primordial responses to create physical and emotional responses in the viewer when they see your character designs, depending on the shapes and colors that you use for your characters, people will make judgments on the kind of people that they are based off of these ingrained responses in us. So don't confuse them by using dangerous shapes on acute soft baby or round safe shapes on an evil dictator. Of course, there can be exceptions to the use of basic shape language. If you want to, for example, confuse or throw off the viewer. You can do this by adding hints to a character's true nature, or perhaps showing that a certain character has room for growth and development simply by the shapes that you pick to incorporate into your design. For example, if your baby is actually an evil demon child, you'll want to hint at this by adding some sharp dangerous shapes into her design. Or for a cry baby dictator, you might add some round shapes or soft, fleshy looking clothing. Character design is all about telling stories and connecting with your audience. So always keep that in mind first before you start designing a character. 4. Learn to Speak Shape Language: Shape language is the secret language that every human nose. Some shapes come pre-programmed in our brains to inspire feelings of danger. Some inspire safety, and others inspire stability. Every good character design is constructed of basic shapes. First, as you can see in these designs, each character has very specific and unique shapes chosen for their base design. These were not picked arbitrarily. They were picked while keeping the principles of shape language in mind in order to say specific things about each character, you'll notice that one bird is mainly constructed of circles and ovals, one of squares and rectangles and the other triangles. Let's break down the basic interpretations of each shape. Circles and flowing lines typically represents softness, homelessness, peacefulness, approachable illness, or to be malleable and changeable. Squares typically are interpreted to be solid, sturdy, strong, reliable, and sometimes in flexible. Whereas triangles and jagged lines feels sharp, directional, dynamic, unpredictable and dangerous. Knowing this basic language and without the shapes being defined for you, answer me, which bird is the soft approachable character? Which Berg is the stubborn, immovable character, which is the villain. Can you see how powerful shape languages and communicating the personalities of these designs? As a word of warning, try not to take this principle to literally. You can mix and match shapes as your design dictates. For example, in this design we have a good mix of curves, circles, ovals, and roundish blobby shapes that give off the overall look and feel of the circle. You'll also notice there are some corners and angles in this. They're just more rounded than they would be in a different character. The key to this design is that I'm mostly avoiding too many straight lines or angles. With that being said, you can create complex characters by mixing and combining shapes, you can design a character that has mostly angles and triangles, but shows a hidden ability to change and grow for the better with some curves and some soft corners. Or you can have a soft, round looking character that actually has a hidden evil side by putting sharp pointy little bits and details all throughout the design. Triangles can also be used to hint at strength or ability, such as a protagonist having sharp pointy hair or armor to suggest that they are capable and can be dangerous if they need to be. Let's take a look at Ralph from Disney's Racket. Ralph. Ralph is a very interesting character and his design perfectly describes his character arc in the movie, he is the villain of his game, but the protagonist of our movie, he needed to look intimidating and strong for us to believe that he was a villain, but also soft and malleable enough that he could possibly change by the end of the movie. His design uses all three shapes effectively. Ralph is known for breaking things, so he is strong and sturdy. The main shape present in his design as a square to reflect that string. Just look at how boxy his hands are. He is also a very stubborn character, which also lens very well to the square. However, Ralph has a soft dean. He just wants to be loved and appreciated. So you can see all those round shapes in his face indicating. So lastly, we need to believe that he's a villain in his game. He's given that edge with the pointy hair and a big triangle across his chest, you can really tell that Ralph's character designers spent a lot of time thinking about his arc as a whole and try to incorporate all the shapes that would reflect that story growth into his design. To demonstrate your knowledge of these principles. After you have designed your character designs for your class project, I would like you to include an image where you have drawn over them the basic shapes of their designs. You can use this image as an example and can download it in the class resources below. 5. On Motifs & Harmony: A more advanced way of using shape language is to create a motif, which is a decorative design or pattern. To create a motif, you really need to spend some time thinking about your character and their overall story or arc. Then with that in mind, you think of a design that really just funnels all of that story into one simple design. Then you use that design like you would with one of the three basic shapes. You just use it throughout your whole design, from the basic shapes all the way down to the little details. For this demonstration for a motif, I've decided that I want to design a moat, be sad bird. And I've decided that a teardrop is a really good motif for expressing that character archetype. A teardrop immediately reads sad to almost any viewers. So I think that this will be a very simple and effective way to communicate a sad character. So what I'm going to do is start tests relating this motif throughout my design, starting with the basic shapes. So I'm not gonna be too literal throughout my design, but I'm just wanna kinda get, I just want to get a basic idea starting with the foundational large shapes. So I'm starting with the head here and then drawing the body. Like I said, I'm not being too literal, but as you can see, I'm keeping this smaller top and I'll large, kind of like blobby bottom. I feel like the teardrop just feels weighted down and droopy. And that's why I think this is gonna be such an effective motif for this design. Getting my basic shapes. So even just using this simple motif in the basic shapes, we already have a pretty strong foundation for this character. You can feel the drooping is the sadness. Oh wait. This is just the beginning phase. So let's keep refining this overall silhouette and start adding in some of the finishing details. So now my aim is to refine the shapes and I'm going in and making it less extreme. And this is where I was saying you don't have to be too literal when keeping continuity with your shape language, you can pull back and push in other areas Just as long as you get the general feeling. Throughout the design of the shape of that you've chosen. To base your character off. I'm mostly just going and solidifying the silhouette. And you'll see here as I flush out the tail on this sad bird, I'm also using the tear shape in the shape feathers just to push that message along to the viewer that this bird is sad. Here, even in the little Blake's dumps. You have the small and the big I've inverted. And I don't think that flipping it so that the bottoms on the top is as effective. But here it's such a small detail on the leg that I'm still able to get the shape even if I've turned and turned it. Around here, I haven't closed the top of the wing. In fact, I'm going to erase this and keep it open. But I have the general shape again of that tear drop shapes. I'm going to add some more little feathers, little details. Bring that consistency throughout. Some right here. I think this little quail feather on the top is a really excellent way of using this shape and further communicating that sad droopy field, just drooping over the face. Then here again in the toes. I'm just trying to get a little bit of that same blobby shape. Even though that was a really quick drawing, you can see how I utilize this motif throughout my entire design, starting from the basic shapes of the silhouette down to the small details and the feathers and the toes. You were not required to use a motif for your class project, but it's something to keep in mind for future projects if you're looking to try something a little more advanced, It's a really effective way at communicating story and personality and your designs. Motifs, or an advanced method for creating harmony. Harmony is keeping your design consistent and balanced within itself to communicate a clear message. This can be achieved whether or not you use a motif, basic shape language can also be used to achieve harmony. For example, if you've chosen the square to be your main shape for your character, you don't have to only use squares, but it should be the main shape that you use throughout your design. You might use it to maybe square off some rounder shapes or keep your angles from getting too pointy, helps you keep your design consistent with itself and send a clear message to your viewer. For example, if you choose a square for your character, you don't have to only use squares and your design, but you should try to use them mainly, starting from the basic construction up into the smaller details. Otherwise, your character may look chaotic and confused and may lose your viewers on your design. You can incorporate your shape in the facial features and the hands, fingers, fingernails, costume elements, shoes, feet, what have you. This helps your character to remain consistent within itself. And two, send a clear message to your viewer. 6. Large, Medium and Small: Now that we know how to tell interesting stories and how to manipulate our audience through basic shape language. It's time to start thinking about how to create interests within our designs. Contrast is when two or more opposing elements are placed together. Whereas variety is just having a lot of different kinds of elements available to look at. When you have contrast and variety and an image, you give the viewer a lot of interesting things to look at in your design. You can have a variety of shapes, textures, proportions, details, and orientations. One of the easiest ways to add variety to a character design is to use the principle of big, medium, and small. Let's look at this character design proportionally. All of the major pieces of this design are functionally the same size. This is boring to the viewer. There is no flow of shapes, sizes to lead the eye around the design. That all looks staining and in general just has a very bland and boring effect. Before understanding the principle of big, medium, and small, it might be hard for an amateur designer or the average viewer to put their finger on why this design is so uninspired. Let's move to a simpler example. We had two snowmen, which snowman is more visually appealing. The one on the right has a lot more interests in variety than the snowman on the left has three sections are all different sizes. Big, medium, and small. Your eye moves organically across his form from top to bottom and bottom to top. Whereas the other snowman doesn't have any direction or flow. It's all the same and very boring. Just like the snowman, when you're designing a character, always tried to include big shapes, medium shapes, and small shapes. Let's take a look at that character from before. But now using these principles, as you can see, this character has many sizes of shapes dispersed throughout the design and is much more interesting to look at, even in the small details of the character is the principle of big, medium, and small being employed. 7. Don't Design Ladders: The principle of designing letters was taught to me by my good friends and comic artists, Johanna Taylor. Another way to practice the principle of big, medium, and small, but also helps with the proportioning and grouping of your design. The idea of this principle is that you do not want the horizontal lines of your character to sit equidistant from one another. For example, with the previous example, if I were to draw horizontal lines across from the major points of interests, it resembles a ladder with about equal runs. However, in the improved design, when drawn across, we can see that the groupings are much more varied and interesting. Again, creating variety in the design. When designing your character, look for these horizontal lines. They typically fall at the top of your character's head, up their neck line, Hamline, at their pants line, and at their shoes. These are the ladder rungs of your design. If they're equidistant from one another, that probably means that your design is kinda boring and could be improved by being mixed up. This principle is also an excellent way to make sure that your costume elements are also interesting. Along with the example that you drew over with the basic shapes, I want you to demonstrate your knowledge of the principle of big, medium, and small by including a side-by-side comparison of your character in its bladder. Again, you can use this as an example. You can also download it in the class resources below. 8. Using Exaggeration: Once you understand the importance of the principle of big, medium, and small, you must then learn how to use it to its greatest advantage. And you do this by combining it with the principle of exaggeration. Exaggeration is how you use your knowledge of the principle of big, medium, and small in conjunction with your character's personality, story, and skill sets. For example, if your character is an academic, you might design them with an exaggerated large head compared to their body. Or if you're designing a woodcutter, you might design their arms to be large and guerilla like with a small body and short legs. The point isn't to arbitrarily choose shapes to be bigger than others are smaller than others. But to strategically pinpoint the pieces of your character that can push the story and their personality by exaggerating them. This is another plug for spending the time thinking about and planning your character's story arc and all the facets of their personality before jumping in blindly into a design. Planning goes a long way with design. Before we move on, I want to give a little bit of a warning that the amount of exaggeration that you use needs to meet the stylistic needs of the type of design that you're doing. For example, realistic designs for movies or video games use a different level of exaggeration, then first-day cartoons or animated films, the designs and Final Fantasy are far less exaggerated than in Spongebob. They still have exaggeration, for example, in the costuming hair and body proportions. But it's done in a believable way that fits in the genre. So another thing add to your planning phase is to think about your audience and what the genre is that you're designing for. When you have picked the type of design it is, and for what audience you're designing for. It will help you determine the level of exaggeration that you should use. Your design. 9. Baby Face Bias: Baby-faced bias is just a funny term for another tool in the designer's toolkit. Though funny sounding, it's just another tool that takes advantage of our primordial hardwiring. They can instantly make a viewer like or feel protective of a character. It uses the science behind the concept of cute. The reason we as humans find things cute is a biological response that makes sure that we want to protect and care for babies. So what makes a baby cute? Big eyes, a little nose and a small mouth, arranged closely together in a pattern called the eye nose triangle with a big head and a small body with lots of round shapes. These features all scream, I'm little in defenseless. Take care of me when designing a character that you should like your hero for your class project, for example, keeping this principle in mind is key. Don't believe me, try googling any main character from any animated show. And you will find that 90% of the time that character will have a shortened, I know it's triangle. If they don't, I guarantee you that they'll always have large eyes to make up for it. Conversely, if you're designing a villain, like for your class project, if you want them to look like a villain, you'll give them small eyes and a heightened, I know it's triangle or a small head. And that will make them look evil and dislike. And again, these are not hard and fast rules. They can be strategically broken when you keep your character story and other design principles in mind. 10. Areas of Rest: Now that you have all these tools in your tool belt, I want you to slow down, look for a minute and not get too excited and clutter up your design with all of this cool new stuff. Visual interest is important, but it can get to a point where you've put way too much interior design. And it can confuse your viewer and actually cause them to stop looking at your design before they've even had time to see all of the elements that you've placed into it. Good character design helps the viewer move their eye effortlessly across the design by having areas of interests and areas of rest. Going back to the ladder design principle, we can see that there are concentrated areas of interests here on the face and head, for the torso is left largely detail free. But then the waist and hips have interests, but the legs are free. This gives the viewer breaks. Their eyes move through your design and keeps them from becoming overloaded with information. This is a simple yet important principle. You don't want to waste all of your time adding tons of detail into your design only for your viewer to give up halfway through before they've even been able to see all that you've put in just because of all the visual clutter. 11. Hero/Villain Demonstration: Now I know that was a lot to learn and you might be feeling a little overwhelmed right now. Don't worry too much though. With practice, these principles will become second nature to you to help show you how I use and implement all these techniques. I'm going to do a little demo for you and design my hero and villain for the class project. So the first thing that I did was just to start to think about what kind of characters I wanted to design. So I just wrote down very basic ideas are archetypes for my characters. And they landed on a little lady bug adventure and an evil beetle mage. So I decided to start designing this little lady bug character and started off just with a very basic shape. I was very rough and loose. And then I went in and just drew a circle since I had decided that I wanted her main shape to be a circle. I went in and I made her head a little circle and then went back and altered the shape to make it not so literal. Her eyes you can tell are also very round and also the ears. The ears are pointed on the end, but the general shape is a circle. I ended up actually ditching them for just a cute little wrap around her head. But I added somewhere around here. And then here I'm flushing out the body. And you'll notice that I get kinda stuck on her costuming. I'm going to erase and draw and erase and draw. Just trying to figure out how to get the overall circle shapes in your design while having that kind of iffy nature. Look to her costume. Eventually ditch the leaf. And you'll just notice that I went Meet the shell on her back list waiting around. I ended up going for just kinda round dress. Does something that had soft curves and edges and it just really touched the leaf dress idea. But altogether it was too pointy. I made her smaller to keep her in contrast to the villain. I wanted to be able to have her with reference. So I again block out the basic shapes and tried to get as many angles as it was nice. The little lady bug next to him so that I could see if he was looking sharp enough in contrast with her with him, I had a little bit of a harder time trying to not make his angles too sharp. I wanted there to be a little more nuance within his character. Didn't want it to be two angled. But as you'll see, as I draw, he loses that edge that he had in the original sketchy. I put too many round edges. I don't keep things as sharp as I should have. And what you'll see is that he does, it looks more like an old man died in his heyday. You stood evil but no longer is evil. And so I, I recognize that and not quite happy with his design at this point in the process. So here I'm finishing up the Lady Bug character. And this is where I decided that I needed a drought over for my husband, who is also designer. I'll have him talk about it a little bit. Thanks for doing this drawer over foreigner. Yeah, of course, I'm kinda fun with this design. The first thing I thought when I saw it was that he didn't look evil enough. You had a lot of great strong triangle shapes and then you had a really fun character. But I felt like he needed to be pushed a little bit further. He looked a little bit too much like a grandpa who used to be evil and was now bringing his costume out to show his grandchildren. So the first thing I did was sharpen up some of those key features on his face. His nose just even a little bit pointier, has chin a little bit pointier. I shrunk his forehead a bit to make him seem just a little bit more disgusted and little bit more disturbed. I really liked how you pulled some of those sharper, more triangular shapes into the design of his entire body, into a silhouette and not just in the features. So I tried to make sure to maintain that as I changed his pose and straighten them up, something else, I wanted to add some different shapes and varying shapes. And so I tried to add some more squares and some more rigid shapes. Show that not only is this person dangerous, but he is capable, he is strong. He's not as feeble as he might've looked in the first drawing. Now I will say that I think the design lost a lot of the fun that you had, but I trusted that you would add that back in and just take the positives from my draw over and I work those into your design. Thank you, Connor. I very much appreciated his draw over it. Definitely brought in that edge that I had lost with my first design. So as I started to go over my old design with his, drove her up in the corner. For reference, I found that it actually was easier just to use the head that he had drawn. It was so good. Like why waste the drawing? So I use that for the face and then I went in and made some adjustments. I still wanted him to be hunched over. That was just the image I had was an old evil like a wizard or which I felt like him standing was too foreboding. It wasn't like the character is looking for. So I pushed him over, but I just added a lot more angles. Got rid of a lot of the softer edges and curves that I had kept in the older design. And I really struggled for a little bit with the hair because I had decided that I was blinded. The long hair, it was breaking up my silhouette too much. And so I decided on short cropped hair. Wanted because I could get more angles and edges in there to further push my triangle shape. But it was getting muddied up with the hand and the theme was just totally wrecking my silhouette. So I decided to actually push the hands out further away from the body so that there would be some negative space around his chin to put their hair and that it wouldn't get lost in his torso. And I felt like that made this design and overall stronger, better character design. These are the two characters opposed from each other. And I feel like they turned out really great. I did notice though that the, I was getting a little bit of a ladder effect on this girl. So I decided to shorten her torso to add more variety to break up that larger dressing. There we have it there. I designed my hero in my village. 12. Final Thoughts: I want to give you a big congratulations on finishing this class. I'm so excited to see your character designs. I hope that you felt confident and excited to use all of the principles that I taught in this class. I hope that you feel really excited about your character designs as well. Even though it seems like a lot right now to memorize and use all of these principles. I promise that with time and practice, but they will become ingrained into your memory. Soon enough. You won't even be actively thinking about them as you're designing. They will just naturally flow from your brain through your hand and onto the paper. Just keep drawing. It will happen soon enough. You will be amazed at the growth that has occurred after some time practicing with these principles. When you look back at your designs before taking this class, please share your completed character designs, your shape and ladder exercises and the project below so that I can see your amazing work. If you want to critique, you can put your designs up in the discussions tab below, or you can DM me on any of the social media platforms that I've shared it previously. Also, if you post your work online, don't forget to tag me in it. This was part one of a three-part series of classes on character design fundamentals. Makes sure that you follow me here on Skillshare so that you can be notified when my next class goes live. And if you liked this class, please leave a review. This really helps me get my glasses out in front of other students. Thanks again, and I'll be seeing you again soon.