How did you overcome same face syndrome

[Cutebaddies]

Artist who suffered from a bad case of same face syndrome how did you overcome it?

[pilot-obvious]

I focused on the aspects that made all my faces look the same and started to adjust those by playing with shapes and proportions. I noticed all of my jawlines and eye shapes were the same and that really contributed to my issues.

Things like eyes, noses, jawlines, ear shape, facial wrinkles, and eyebrows are some of the easiest things to play around with when creating facial variety. It helps to reference portrait photos and pick out the features that make each person look unique, then try recreating those portraits in your style!

[ninjashira]

I think there are two really helpful things to try in an effort to overcome sameface.

1. Draw from real people. Even if you work in a cartoony style, take some time to sketch from actual real people to study and analyze different shapes of faces and eyes and noses and chins and foreheads. Specifically, don't just draw pretty people. If you only draw the kinds of faces you think are aesthetically appealing to you, then you're only going to draw one kind of face. Draw people of different ages, ethnicities, weights, etc. to explore all the different shapes and features there are in faces.

2. When simplifying and cartooning, pick one shape or feature for each character that you want to emphasize or highlight. So for one character you can give them the shape "circle," and then every design choice you make for that character will be informed by circles. As a visual example...

I gave this character the "circle" shape, so everything on her is circle-informed. Her hair is just a series of three circles, her face is circular, her eyes are big and round and circular, her nose is a semi-circle, even her body shape is like a circle for her chest and a circle for her hips, then arms and legs sticking out.

But for this character, I went with "triangle"...

His face is like a squared-off triangle, his hair is pointy like triangles, his torso is shaped like an inverted triangle, the design on his shirt is a triangle, his cape is kind of a triangle, his nose is more triangular than the previous character, and his eyes come to points at the sides in a more angular shape.

[eyewhiskers]

It’s really hard to do actually! Especially if your doing an especially cartoonish or anime style.

For me, my style is somewhere between anime and American comics so I really try to play with all the different aspects of a face.

For my boys here specifically, I think about a number of things.

1) Eye shapes. One has hooded, square eyes and the other has more angular eyes with very heavy eyelids.

2) Overall face structure. Note how they are both well cut faces, but the blonde is much more square as opposed to the narrow point of my dark haired boy.

And plenty of different things. You can add scars, different nose shapes, change the width or height of a face and more!

There are so many different aspects to a face that are what make it unique and you can still maintain these changes within your style as long as you practice it!

[Scarlet_Cryptid]

TBH, this is a journey I'm still on. I'm getting better, but I'm not quite there yet.

I'll parrot what a lot of others have said: use specific, different features to define specific characters, draw from life/real people, don't just draw pretty people, etc.

One thing that helps me is having what I call a 'face claim', where I find an actor or model (or several of them) whose face I use as a template for a specific character. It's sort of the 'If I had to cast this character in a movie, who would I choose?' question. (I have a character who will pop up later who has a face structure/set of expressions loosely based on Lin-Manuel Miranda, for example. And I'm waffling between two or three different actresses for my MC.)

[Mallory]

I decided I didn't really care about it that much.

In the sense of... I don't think my characters suffer from same face syndrome. But at the end of the day if I'm going to spend thousands of hours drawing stuff, I want to draw things that I like and that make me feel happy. So if that means that I keep drawing the same features that I find aesthetically appealing... well, I'm going to do just that, and ain't nobody gonya tell me otherwise. Luckily, I find a bunch of features appealing so I just mix and match within that set. Whenever I see an actor or other person who's got a attractive face to me, I yoink some references and stick 'em in a folder with their name attached, then flip through it if I'm trying to pin down a character. From there, easiest way to do it is by varying the shape of the nose and brows, IMO. Throw in a different eye shape and you got a completely different person by comic standards!

[nathanKmcwilliams]

Yeah I just don't fight it anymore. Go with what's easiest, especially if you have to draw the characters over and over again. So basically I just use different eye shapes or nose shapes and call it good.

[liamnaughton7]

I smoke about a pack a day and work the night shift while raising three kids so everytime I look in the mirror I see a totally different face.
An older and uglier face.
Oh... drawing faces? Well my designs don't finalize until I'm drawing the storyboards. Having to draw characters over and over again real quick means they start to pick up these little features. Basically to differentiate them from the others. Eventually I end up in a situation where I'll draw like two lines and go "yeah, I'll know who that is."

[SpectreFirst]

If you want to learn how to create different types of faces effectively, I very strongly recommend you to find "The Mad Art of Caricature!: A Serious Guide to Drawing Funny Faces" by Tom Richmond, I saw it online but I don't remember where, but you can google it and you'll find plenty of pages from that book all over the place, that book will teach you how to properly see and evaluate different facial features and how to translate them into your style. Caricatures exaggerate facial features so it's really easy to learn from them, the only thing you'll have to do is to make them less exaggerated. This helped me tremendously when I was trying to build different facial structures for my models, I can't say I can do it perfectly now but at least I have all the necessary info about it so it's only a matter of practice for me and I'm not even an artist.

[monochrome0M394]

often i can't tell alot of faces because my brain percieves their faces as the same. this applies to clothes,hair etc. but i'm trying my best on making them a little different.

although i'm kind of insecure on how the characters looks like because when i draw them in a unique shape. it came out werid in my own eyes-

[Kaydreamer]

I did it little by little. (I used to have a rather plain anime atyle.)

• At first, when I was trying to change my eye style, I began to explore different eye shapes.
• Eyebrows! This one's easy. Some people have thick ones, some peoples are thin, some curve, some are straight.
• After eyes and eyebrows, it was noses. I started making some big, some small, and all different shapes. My favourites are still cute little Disney-esque button noses, but I can also draw flat noses, round noses, and big pointy stonkers like the one on my protagonist.
• The last one was face shapes! I still only have three main ones I lean into, but combined with the other various facial features, that's enough that I haven't had noticeable issues with same-face syndrome for some time. My advice here; if you typically draw soft, feminine faces, make a beefy jock character with a rectangle jaw. That'll get you exploring the planes of the face and where features should go a little more, which will open you up to more exploration once you grow comfortable with that.

[Nen]

Same face syndrome is good. Don't bother changing it and spend the energy in other aspects. It's fine if the only defining aspects of your characters are their clothes and accessories for a while because even in real life those are super important big identifiers.

Same face syndrome also allows you to be more expressive with the faces, since it's easier to manipulate so you can also differentiate characters by the kind of expressions they make and how they emote. Utilise it as a positive rather than worrying about "fixing it", the gains to your story telling ability will far outweigh the minor cost of them having similar faces

[starless]

I want to draw things that I like and that make me feel happy.

I found an enlightenment!

[GrimRose]

I studied shape language in character design. Tried to apply it to my future character designs. I also found I had to break out of the mold of drawing the typical "attractive" character type.

[powerplantanimations]

We didn't...

Read That Stick Figure Isekai | Tapas Web Comics

[kitschensyngk]

I have a page template saved on Inkscape that includes an "eye bank" containing a different pair of eyes for each character.

[darthmongoose]

I try to keep in mind all the different areas of the face that could be different on a character.

Skintone: Obviously human skintone varies from very dark brown, though all sorts of different browns (varying not just in lightness or darkness but in how golden, red or blue they lean) through light tans but also light pinks. Not all people of any given race are the exact same colour; hell, there can be a lot of colour variation between even siblings sometimes. I try to give characters a variety of skintones even when depicting people of the same race.

Face shape: I often find art tutorials go way too far and have the faces all as like perfect circles or squares and stuff. It's more subtle than that, but some people have a very narrow jaw or pointed chin, others a very square chin and then there's stuff like cheekbone width or forehead height. Also not having the jawline sag or get heavier at all is a classic newbie mistake when drawing old people that always leads to "looks like a young person with lines drawn on their face".

Nose: Noses are awesome. Like seriously, this is the most under-utilised area for making characters look different in comics in my opinion. There's so much you can do with noses! length, height of bridge, width, tip shape, whether they point up or down... Don't sleep on noses.

Eyebrows: There's a bunch of options here, like thick or thin, arched or straight, the overall shape and whether they're neat or bushy.

Eyes: It often helps to look at real people for inspiration here. People can have all sorts of eye shapes. Just try things out and play around with both the shape of the upper and lower lid and how it affects the expressions, plus things like lines around the eye.

Mouth: I'll admit, I personally am not incredibly inventive with mouths, but in some styles, they can be a big part of a character's overall look. Some people do have a distinctive mouth.

Examples: Here's a bunch of unnamed random knights I put into a panel. Even though they're basically NPCs and they're all people roughly the same age as young adults, I put a little effort into making them all distinctive:

I take a similar approach with the main cast, where I try to vary up things like eyebrow shape and thickness, eye shape, nose shape, size and height and skintone so that especially once you add the hairstyle and colour on top, you get a distinct look to each character. Rekki, being the main character, is the only person I draw with her distinctive thin and completely straight eyebrows, because I want her to be unique looking.

Fun note: Jules and Urien share the same eye shape and nose shape as well as skintone because they're siblings. Their facial expressions are often very different though, and being a beefcake, post timeskip Urien in particular has a much heavier face than his sibling.

Overall, just mess around with things, and try not to worry about making characters attractive. There are lots of ways to be attractive, and sometimes a character you design to look "interesting" will be perceived by the audience as more attractive than one you design to be "pretty"! Jules has kind of a horsey long face with droopy eyes and a big, slightly hooked nose and a very pallid skintone and yet seems to get the most readers going "omg I love them. Damn, they're so hot!" out of the entire cast.