"Same-y" characters?

[panistheman]

I try to make my characters as distinct as possible since a significant portion of Capefall takes place in a girl's high school where everyone has the same uniform.

[Caelestie]

Wow it is so rare to see so much diversity in female characters! I applaud you! It is a great thing to see!

[TrustyShamrock]

i try reeeeally hard to make my characters look different in Robo Hole (cough shameless advertisement cough). like eyes and hair obvi but also height... mouth shape... face shape... eyebrows all that bizz. i try to change it up for each character. but theres still SOMETHIN about them that kinda looks alike and i cant figure out what. someone said once that they kinda all look a little like me so maybe im just usin my own face as a starter and then mixin it up from there
but heres some exampleh

[Kayke]

It can be hard to keep everyone looking like separate characters when you have a simple looking style. I found that a kind of cheat code to making people look different is giving them different noses? You can draw two people with the same eyes and mouths but if they have different noses they'll look like totally different people... though it looks like you don't draw noses... so changing the hair and proportions up does wonders too!

I have two characters who are really similar looking, but they're siblings so that was intentional.

I try to make sure that his face is a little more square at the jaw than her's, but I think their bodies and hair make them look different enough. Not to mention coloring prevents any confusion.

[whydocowsfall]

I try quite hard to make my characters look different - way more than personalities. (Which may be a bad thing? Who knows...) Though this is easier because my characters always end up being completely different to each other for a ton of reasons! For example, Odysseus is a human hero with big eyebrows and Polyphemus is a giant, green, bald cyclops. The other two majorish characters I'm going to introduce are also pretty different, but they required more thought to ensure that. Only one of them is human though... There are also a few background characters that will appear next chapter, but again, they're reasonably distinct.

(Guess who's who... d: )

[getsuart]

Unless they are related somehow (siblings, parents, cousins), they are supposed to not really look alike. Like, you know, like in some shojos where all the dudes and dudettes look the same except with the haircut and the colors.
Got some here that are Echo related if you wanna see.
I must I also love to do some secondary characters, they help a lot for a bigger diversity. XD

[bsienk90]

Oh wow. Good question. I TRY and give my characters distinctive features so they don't look the same.

[joannekwan]

Oh yes, I try to vary my characters by a lot, since I really don't like comics where characters have the same faces, excluding comedies and really simple styles like Cyanide and Happiness. I have a mental library of face shapes, eyes, noses, mouths, and body shapes, and I shuffle those around to create new character designs.

[Stellamari]

I have horrible same face syndrome, so I try to make as much variation as possible.

[joannekwan]

I feel your comic's style is simple enough to get away with that though. It is very cute. ^^

[YoungAdventurer]

Wow they're all so unique!

[AnnaLandin]

I used to have this problem - where I drew the same body type, the same facial shape, etc., etc. - on nearly all of my characters. So it's a problem I've consciously tried to get away from, and with Grassblades, I hope I've made some progress:

As for gender-distribution: the top two characters in picture number two are girls, as are the two characters on the left in the bottom picture - and so is Akane, the little girl in the top picture. I've had people accidentally mis-gender both Akane and Kazue (bottom picture, far left), because they lack definite gender-markers - Akane's a six year old, and she wears blue+shorts, which I suppose confuses some people, and Kazue is very, very flatchested and slim and short, so I suppose she seems boyish, but they're definitely both girls.

[TrustyShamrock]

woah yeah ya did a good job with yer characters. ya also got a pretty neat style so that works for ya too. kinda reminds me of avatar + naruto

[AnnaLandin]

@TrustyShamrock Avatar? Ooooh, you're making me blush! Thank you so much!

[WarkDatch]

I try my best to distinct my characters (physically) as possible, especially "same face syndrome", but just like real life, there are always those characters that will look physically same.

[purrlpankras]

My characters of Two Faced I hope they dont look the same unless they're related o_e

[kazukitakamura126]

I believe this is one of my strong suits in character design I make all of character look distinct so you can easily identify them.
Here's an example of the protagonists and the female lead from my comic Seishin Patona.

[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?