Hi, I'm PE and I'm the creator of Teach Me, Ami! A comic series where human and alien life collide. I've been designing characters for a while and I thought I could give some helpful tips and tricks to designing characters.
Warning: These are just my opinions and everyone has their own way of designing characters.
So to show my own process I'll be using my character, Ami, from my comic. This is Ami.
So before I start to design anything, I keep in mind this one thing.
Tip 1: Personality
Personality is the key to many things and can dictate a lot of what your character looks like. So for Ami, she's very mature, kind, and a bit of a brainiac, but is very introverted. So I thought of all these things when designing her. Here's Ami's final character sheet.
As you can see, in the final design I gave her she has a very mature outfit, that still looks cute. I added in glasses and put her hair in a bun to give her that smart girl look. And for colors, I gave her muted tones to push that maturity and introverted personality.
Tip 2: Don't be scared to mess around with art style.
Many people think once you get down a certain look all the characters should fit within that style. But that's not always 100%. Just look at Ami next to another character in the story.
As you can see I made a few changes to the eyes and overall facial shapes of the characters. But you see how they still look like they come from the same story. Little changes like this can add a lot of personality to your characters.
Tip 3: Silhouette
A Silhouette is like the shadow of your character. A character should be recognizable just by the shape of their silhouette. Here's what Ami looks like just by her silhouette.
We can still clearly see it's here and she can't be mistaken for anyone else's characters. A great way to add to a design is to give an iconic pose to your character, this adds to the silhouette.
Tip 4: Don't go with the first idea!!
Your drawings are always changing and this goes for character designing too. When designing a character it's never good to go with the first idea that comes to your head. The best way is to put that idea down and refine it. Here's some early concept art of Ami.
See how different she is now. Some things may stay the same and that's fine, but the key is to refine and try new things you never thought of using.
And for my last tip.
Tip 5: Don't be scared to use references
Referencing things can be a good way to come up with your own ideas. Like, need to draw a bike, use a reference for it. Many people use them. Here's an example of how I used references I found off of google to design Amis's outfit.
I'm not the best when making outfits that look modern and that you would see in real life. So I took a few images I found that had nice outfits and I wrote notes of some of the things I thought looked nice. And next to them you can see the sketches I made trying some of these outfits and playing around with them.
And look an original outfit came from that.
So that's the end of my tips and tricks to character designing if people are interested I could probably expand more on this. If you're interested in reading my comic here's the link to it, 6 pages every 2 weeks.
And I really hope this helps someone who's new or needs help with designing characters.
