"Same-y" characters?

[Stellamari]

Aww shucks /////// thank you, Joanne! That's the reason for that style though, I just wanted something that's presentable yet not too time consuming.

[ErithEl]

I definitely try to make my characters for Burning Bright look different! Most of them are actually animal-human hybrids, so sometimes it can be fun coming up with their character designs!

I think same face syndrome comes from a lot of us watching anime or reading manga...we see characters with different hair styles and different eyes and think that they are completely different. It's the noses and mouths that end up being the same.

By the way, I was just talking about this subject with the creator of Bumbleberry Pie. The page I linked has a good example of character that look different!

[Zanreo]

Sometimes i feel like my characters look too similar (except for clothes and hair - I have a lot of fun designing those), especially kinda same-face-y. While I put some effort into varying the faces of my 3 main characters... it just gets harder and harder to remember the more characters you have. I try, at least?

[MoiAri]

As a comic artist this is something you should avoid the most...

ironic being that my faces still aren't very diverse, beyond Hair, mouth, along with blatant facial features like scars, makeup,ect. But its the best i can personally do for the sake of my reader understanding of 'who's who' :/

[ashriott]

The characters I have introduced so far aren't too same-ish I think. Below aren't great examples cause it's easier to tell them apart when coloured, but my comic is all black & white(I'm to lazy to crop my pages and compare them at the moment xD)

I did try my best to keep them distinctive and give them their own physical traits. It does concern me readers might have a hard time telling characters apart later when more are introduced though...

[joannekwan]

Just did this as a quick exercise. I wanted to see how different my characters' faces are, omitting facial hair and other distinguishers. These are the males, might do the females later.

[ErithEl]

@joannekwan this actually seems like a really cool and beneficial exercise! Your characters definitely do look unique

[TheLemmaLlama]

I wouldn't really bother that much, since distinguishing details tend to be a pain to remember and execute the same way over and over again throughout the course of a webcomic

I think if you're good at portraying personality, you'd probably be able to tell who is who based on dialogue/body language/behaviour alone even if the look exactly the same

I'm not that good myself though, so I try to give main characters different hair/eye colours at least just as a shorthand for "character X". I'm not that obsessed about accurately portraying realism XD

I'd probably try to vary characters a bit more in more static media where you can recycle your drawings though, like visual novels

[eschaefges]

I think visual identities are hugely important. 1) comics are a visual medium - so you should be using your pictures to tell the story, not just the words. 2) people's personality comes out so much in their appearance that it helps to reflect that in the story.

i am working on concept drawings right now for my followup series to A Legend (of Some Sort), which will be unrelated but feature a large group of men as primary characters. I have been trying to keep them distinct so that the audience knows which is which at a moment's glance and doesn't get confused. that way, they can keep enjoying the story!

my tablet right now:

[PocketFloral]

1) comics are a visual medium - so you should be using your pictures to tell the story, not just the words. 2) people's personality comes out so much in their appearance that it helps to reflect that in the story.

YES THIS!! I agree with both points so much it hurts.

Anyways having diverse characters is one of my favorite things about making stories. I love drawing characters of all shapes/sizes/races/age/gender orientations. It's part of the fun for me.

[sophiekaldinski]

Oh dear, I adore your style! I´m currently still working on that kind of diversity in facial/body features, but wow huge inspiration right here!

[sophiekaldinski]

I think creating diversity can be pretty hard. I noticed that a certain style of drawing can hinder one to make characters truly diverse.

I at least try to make my main characters look sorta different from each other, but I noticed that I also have a certain type of men that I use kind of often (muscular men, big chubby men, strong jawline, beard), but I´m currently trying to mix that formula up a bit.

It´s hard and takes a lot of effort and I respect anyone that is able to draw diverse looking characters. You people rock.

[TheLemmaLlama]

2) people's personality comes out so much in their appearance that it helps to reflect that in the story.

Ehhh more so in their posture, expression and style of dress than natural features tbh The advantage to having different designs though is that characters can react to one another's appearances realistically

[PocketFloral]

You have a point but how a character feels about their own body/appearance (esp what they can't change about it) can be a huge part of writing them and making them believable to the audience. Also natural features can give big clues to a characters possible cultural background without having to take the time to explicitly explain it. (like Connie from SU).
For me a big advantage to having a diverse cast is that it helps your story become more relatable to a larger scope of people. There's so many different types of people reading comics and I know from personal experience how nice it is to be able to see parts of yourself in a character that never get covered in popular media (it makes it feel like the author gets you on some leve?? idk it feels awesome tho). Another advantage is it's also much more visually stimulating too (at least in my personal opinion).

Oh dear, I adore your style! I´m currently still working on that kind of diversity in facial/body features, but wow huge inspiration right here!

Also thank you so much Sophie!! I love your character designs too, I'm loving all the different body types esp in your line up. I get what you mean too, about having certain types of men you return to continually (sigh, tall men with chub my muse)

[riverfur]

I don't know...I think that the point of having diverse character designs is that people don't actually look the same? And I know that comics don't have to mirror the real world, but it makes for a more...believable world and characters.

[AnnaLandin]

I don't know...I think that the point of having diverse character designs is that people don't actually look the same? And I know that comics don't have to mirror the real world, but it makes for a more...believable world and characters.

Agreeing with this. People don't look the same, and the bodies we inhabit will influence how we experience the world. Consider how people of different skin colours are treated differently. Consider how overweight people experience the world differently from people who are slim. Consider that you're treated differently if you're ugly, or if you're exceptionally beautiful.

The world is a very different place if you're not of average height, for example. Very short people will find it hard to operate in a world designed around people much taller than themselves - just as very tall people will find it difficult to find clothes that fit, or beds long enough that their feet don't hang off the edge when they sleep, or cars that aren't cramped, etc.

@crapshoot Varied facial- and body-types is both about realism in how you depict people, and it's a lot more fun than just drawing the same body over and over and over again.

[TheLemmaLlama]

Fair enough I guess I just won't go out of my way to make characters look different unless I feel like it or unless a character's physical feature serves an important part of their character or the plot Good points though, and of course the benefits of having diverse character designs vastly outweigh the alternative

[shazzbaa]

Oh man. I feel pretty confident about my faces most of the time, but I deeeefinitely feel similarly to @sophiekaldinski -- I have almost a "default" body type that I'll tend towards if I'm not actively striving to do something different (though I'm the opposite in that a lot of my boys tend to be scrawny, haha!)

I have only in the past couple of years really started to branch out in terms of taking an effort to NOT MAKE EVERYONE WHITE, and man, that has helped a lot -- there's so many more design options when I started asking "well, could this character be a different race/ethnicity?" that I can't believe I've been ignoring all this time. xD

An exercise that actually helped me out a bunch was this "character variety" meme I found once on Deviantart -- I just crammed all my characters in there instead of comparing two specific ones, and it helped me get a good idea of which characters didn't really have a distinct look or feel. I'd definitely recommend it if you're looking to explore that sort of thing!

My favourite dumb detail that nobody thinks about is actually ......teeth? An underbite or overbite changes the whole shape of a character's face, and weirdly implies a lot about their personality for such a tiny change. I love seeing imperfect teeth or an imperfect bite in other characters. IT'S A TINY DETAIL and not as big a deal as like....silhouette and body type, but it's my favourite tiny detail. :>

[lostballoon]

I'm pretty good at varying the body types of my female characters, but I'm so bad at drawing different guy bodies!! They're usually just varying heights of scrawny. I do try to make sure everyone has distinct silhouettes and facial features, though. It's a lot more fun to write and draw a diverse cast, anyway. ^^"

This is an older doodle of my comic's cast! I love drawing them all hehe.

[heterodont]

I definitely have a tendency to lean towards male characters for some reason p: ... Not quite sure why, especially when I have designed female characters in the past and still do - its just whenever I make a cast for a story it unintentionally always becomes a potential BL... it's something I need to work on for sure. also varying noses because I always default to a ' > ' looking of nose. I always have body types in mind but neglect to draw them as such...

I'm gonna post two examples because the first one is the cast of my current story, so I designed all of them during middle school. the second example (hastily put together because I haven't had time to draw a height chart) is from this past year, try to note the difference..,,, (oh how ashamed I am for not vaRYING SKIN TONES)