What to do with Characters with Similar Designs?

[ToxicRamen]

I'm trying to get my characters for my webcomic together but I notice two of my characters have similar designs. I like both designs on them and I hate to change it but I don't want the readers to think that the characters look the same. So what you guys do when you have two or more characters that have similar designs? ( And I'm not counting those comics in the which all of the characters are suppose to look the same like Doodle for Food or Owlturd Comix )

[octopusfwb]

I know it's tough to give up on a design you like, and that's probably why you have two characters who look similar. For me, I try to do a silhouette test. I want my cast for my books to be distinct even from their silhouettes. The best example I've seen professionally is with Team Fortress characters. If you look at a line up of their characters, how they stand, the height in which they hold their weapon, everything helps to make sure you can recognize them from a distance. That's the type of test I try to do with my stuff. And I make one an octopus, just to be sure he stands out .:)

[joannekwan]

Haha, if one of the series is half-baked and I don't plan on completing it, I'll recycle the character design for a better series.

But if the two series are running at the same time, I would tweak one or the other, change up hairstyle, body type, facial features, etc.

[Evan]

All my characters look the same, but I just add a distinctive feature so no one gets confused.

[Mharz]

You don't need to change anything if you don't want to but if you want to your characters not to look the same, slight adjustments like changing the shape/angle of the eye, making the sleeves short or long, adding a extra outfit or any kind of feature etc. can go far.

[shazzbaa]

I've mentioned it before, but I really like this meme as a way to kind of find places where characters are super similar to each other -- which also shows you what might be good places to push them in different directions. Do they have exactly the same nose? Give one of them a super different nose! Etc. etc.

I like both designs on them and I hate to change it

A big hurdle for me was realising that nothing's stopping me from wildly experimenting. You don't have to Officially Decide To Change It in order to try drawing a character with a different look. I would get really hung up on things like "but I've always imagined this character being skinny, I can't imagine them being fat," ----- and the thing that I realised was that you can go ahead and draw the character really differently as an experiment, to see if you can make it work! And if it doesn't work, don't do it, but trying it out might help you find something cool.

Sometimes just by drawing a character over and over again with a different design, to try it out, I'd get a feel for this new look, and I'd start getting excited about the new design that I hadn't been sure about before. So, go ahead and try to change some things up -- you don't have to commit to a decision before you try drawing it! What if you change someone's race? What if you give one of them really distinctive facial hair and a different nose? What if you change their body type? even if it feels weird at first, and even if you ultimately don't use some of the experiments you try, it's still good practice to try drawing it and see what it looks like!

[phen]

If the designs are similar due to it being a preferred visual theme, flaunt the heck out of it. As you suggested in reference to a couple works, it's more of an aesthetic style than a negative thing. It creates continuity in a work and gives your audience something concrete to remember your work/designs by. A great commercial example could be Butch Hartman characters (almost all generally look the same).

However, in the case that two characters coincidentally look the same, I might take it as a happy accident and try to think critically about how they're related to one another story-wise. It could be your subconscious stringing together a set of ideas. The characters are relatives of one another or have the same mentality toward how they keep up their physical appearance. It's a reflection of reality -- how many times have you met someone new and thought, "Whoa, they look just like so-and-so!"

Worst-case scenario would be that an artists' designing abilities are still new and they need to work on variation. If this is the issue, it's as simple as sitting down and reworking the characters, focusing on tweeking subtle features to make a clearer distinction between them.