One for all my Boatem fans

On character design

Yo!

I’ve had a few people ask me to make tutorials on character design, but I’ll be honest: For me character design isn't entirely an artistic thing. It combines some of my stronger ideals with artistic taste. This makes it sort of odd to just make “a tutorial” on how to do it, as there’s a lot more to it than just the art. I’ll summarise the artistic part in short: Almost any good quality character design tutorial will most likely go into things like silhouettes, body shape, how to stylize, unique faces/facial features. If you really desperately want information on that it’s out there, google and/or the search tool are your friend. For me I’ll talk exclusively about how I try to design my own characters (mostly in my comics) from a more philosophic standpoint, rather than just “this is how you do the arts”. I’ll divide it by general areas, This journal’s subject shall be:

My characters aren’t me. This isn’t as obvious as it sounds, I’m not just talking about the “Mary Sue” thing. I’m sure most people who are interested in good character design already avoid extreme self-inserts like the plague.  The thing is, most characters we make still strongly pander to our own tastes. Guys draw girls with the body type they like, girls often like dudes who they’re into in some shape, A “good” character often shares our own sense of morality, cause that's  what we consider “good”. There’s always exceptions of course, sometimes we design characters for us to hate, sometimes for the audience to hate. Sometimes we design characters simply cause they’ll pander to very specific niche audiences.  Heck, sometimes we “design” characters to be unnoticeable and whatever, the so called NPC-group of design. I really don’t enjoy designing characters this way much at all for one big reason: Designing characters to pander to what you personally like (or by extension, what is “popular”) is almost “too easy” for me,  rather than having to put a lot of effort into making a character who can be considered appealing to anyone.  I find that it’s much easier to be satisfied with a design that, simply put, appeals to you simply cause they’re already in my interest group. For me that’s a reason to avoid it. examples: 1. I’ve got a thing for more gothy/alternative looking girls in terms of style/clothing. It takes a lot of effort for me to see this type of character and to really go “meh”, these designs have that sort of appeal to me. 2. Non-human characters in most shows always appealed to me a lot just by virtue of being a “cool weird thing”. Even in shows that I consider to have fairly subpar designs in general I often still find myself loving “that one dragon dude” or “mr.lizardman”.  3. In contrast, like many DA users, I often find myself much preferring more obscure/oddball protagonists to the typical “dumb action guy” trope that plagues a lot of hollywood movies (for example), so those types of characters have the opposite effect for me: I tend to dislike them almost by default. Rather than taking this knowledge and going “TIME TO MAKE A TEAM OF HOT GOTHS, LIZARDMEN AND WIZZADZ!” I actually try to do the opposite, I ask questions such as: 1. How can I make an “action hero” type protagonist that’s subversive and fun enough for me to love the character, despite being in a “bad bad” camp.

2. Similar to (1) I designed “tom” from the TOM RPG comics I posted in a similar vein. He’s like the polar opposite of the type of character I'd ever enjoy or like when played straight. (bumbling hero with a heart of gold who manages to save the day eventhough he’s not an expert)  By taking a trope I actually loathe and forcing myself to find a way to make it extremely enjoyable, I designed that character & that comic. 3. In my comics I intentionally avoid having a “cool lizard dude thing” in any significant main-team role for one dead simple reason: I like them too much and it happens too much.

In my webcomic 3/3 protagonists are human and out of their planned extended parties roughly 1 character can genuinly be classified as non-human. This character looks more like a puppet than a fun lizard-thing. Obviously my story is not devoid of them entirely, but I avoid putting such characters in spots that are .. “easy”.

4. I don’t design my female characters to be my own personal eye candy: Inverse, flip or scew this to fit your own sexuality: I notice a somewhat common trend in some art/art styles is that I can quite easily distill what sort of bodytype the author likes by sheer virtue of just looking at their comic. Sadly the most common exception to this rule seems to be the: “one for everyone”-trope where each girl is designed to pander to a specific audience. I’ll be honest, when your female cast’s most distinguishing features are breast size and hair colour, to me it doesn’t feel like you’re designing characters.  Here’s a good way to think about designing females: If they have no hair, no breasts, no clothes and the same vacant expression:how are they still unique? If your answer to that question is anything but an entire wash list of clearly distinct traits that you barely have to think about, you’re dealing more in  simplistic archetypes than an actual unique character design. (the same counts for male characters obviously, but most people are significantly better at getting those right.) 5. A final but important point that I might a longer article on later: I don’t see myself as the ultimate arbiter of what is “good” This might be an odd point to make, but a problem I often see in fiction, especially with protagonists is that they’re either in two camps: 1. the author agrees with them and they’re extremely self-righteously goody-good. (but can still be seen as awful in the eyes of the audience in the author’s morals are questionable) 2. The author disagrees with them and this is shown through an extreme punisher-style personality that we’re clearly meant to disagree with but not really. (a lot of dark superheroes fall in this camp.) I try to do something different: I often think of positions I can imagine a lot of people agreeing  with that aren’t necessarily specifically good or evil as much as that they are simply fundamentally different from my own on important issues. This goes beyond making your character a fun little project who’s grumpy but secretly a lovely-kun or adding a “flaw” to keep it interesting (like having them be much more materialistic than you) this is about such fundamental parts of the character that you’d probably bang your head in the wall if you had to listen to them rant about morals. If your character can have some epic speech about gay rights, humanity, the human soul, religion or your favourite zelda game guess and you agree with them 100% cause it’s so epic, guess what? That’s you talking. Not your character. The tricky part is this: How do you make a character that you can actually strongly disagree with and still treat him or her like a genuinly loveable non-evil protagonist?  To me answering that question is a great way to get the basis for a very unique character set. Anyway, I’ll go into some of my other character-design ideals later on, this is enough for now. small disclaimer: 1. I don’t think it’s wrong/bad to bring up political issues or religion in a comic or story, I just don’t think that having a character hold your exact position leads to the most interesting type of characters. Same for the exact opposite. If you really want gay rights to have a significant role in any story you write for example, there are such more unique and impactful ways to bring it up than “my straight protagonist is for gay rights and will now shout about it!”.  2. Most examples cited of things I wouldn’t do myself aren’t necessarily things I find the wrongest evilest thing ever, these are just choices I personally make to try and get to the most interesting designs. They’re possible options you yourself can consider, not magical rules that cannot be broken. 3. When I randomly doodle up stuff for the fun of it I’m a lot more willing to pander to myself, almost all things listed here are meant to challenge in a way that broadens the mind. If you’re satisfied with drawing gothy or muscly girls all day long power to you.

Pablo isn’t happy with Burk’s choice of a holiday destination!

A cool hero I designed for use in my comic some day.  Read my webcomic @ www.neorice.com

100 Hero Oh Hero character sprites. All characters designed for use in my pixelart webcomic @ www.neorice.com As many of these haven’t shown up in the actual comic yet, many of their designs are subject to change before ventual appearance.

A little image showing the style progression of Burk, one of the lead characters in my webcomic Hero Oh Hero @ www.neorice.com (formerly known as ptGG);  This image only shows the 4 styles used before the reboot & the one I’m sticking with for the new comic.I’ve made 5-6 extra Burk styles that I’ve never officially used so I’m not putting those in the full sheet.

Attempt at vertical ad for my comic ( www.neorice.com ) What do you guys think?

Part of an art trade with Neorice, of his character Burk and his noble steed from his super awesome pixeled goodness webcomic, Hero Oh Hero! He is a hottie ‘w’

Burk!

Hero Oh Hero:

Here’s every female character for my comic I’ve made pixelart for so far. Enjoy the designs and check out my webcomic at: www.neorice.com  (most of these won’t shop up for ages tho hahah.)

Been working on school kid designs for chapter 2 of my webcomic, Hero Oh Hero.  Please check it out @ www.neorice.com if the idea of a pixelart webcomic seems interesting to you! Thank you.

150 character sprites for my webcomic Hero Oh Hero, found here: www.neorice.com I could probably put over 200 chars in my sheet if I organized my sprite files better, but 150 is a nice number. 

On Character Design: Part 2

Ages ago before most of you found my tumblr, I posted this: http://neorice.tumblr.com/post/37640697370/on-character-design I wanted to expand a bit on that post with some additional points.

In my first journal I talked a bit about the things I avoid doing when designing characters, but I think I’d like to spend some time & attention on what I *do* focus on. 1. Avoidance of the overly remarkable visual hero syndrome

Now I know that title sounds like I’m once again talking about what I *don’t* do, but listen up; Most people do FINE at designing recognisable party members & protagonists.  And … to me that’s a bit of an issue. It reminds me a lot of playing an old RPG where they reuse the same NPC sprites in every town 5 times and then there’s one character in the town who stands out like a sore thumb, visually.  Every time I see that my head just instantly goes: “GEE, I WONDER WHO MIGHT JOIN MY PARTY IN THIS TOWN”. Rather than care about various unique characters that make the town alive, visually those games already tell you “ignore the other stuff, this is the important thing." 

These four people are hanging out in the local pub, guess which one joins your party/is the final boss? Now obviously you can argue "Hey but sometimes important people stand out more!” which is fine, but here’s the thing: When your party member is supposed to be a totally regular villager who just happens to aid you (often the case), or when a village/location is meant to be filled with badass characters … inappropriate visual cues can ruin the illusion. In the image shown above we’ve got dirt poor villagers & an arrogant isolationist hero who outright avoids hanging out where the regular villagers do. He’d stand out but he should and wants to. 

These four random villagers are hanging out in the town square, which of these will give up their regular life to go adventure!? Uniformity of style & wardrobe is a tool you can use to make it clear a person really was a regular villager until adventure got in their way.

Nobody expects the plain village girl clad in brown rags to step up and save our extravagant hero at the last moment, so it makes her step towards becoming a full fledged hero all the more impressive. She wasn’t someone designed from the ground up to be “miss iconic hero”, she started out wearing scraps and being just like the other villagers. A GREAT example of this principle in action is the manga/anime Attack on Titan. The forced uniformity surrounding the entire cast combined with an avoidance of absurd haircolours/traits makes the characters feel far less significant and unique. Whenever you see people wearing the same uniform die horrid deaths you feel like it could’ve just as well been one of the characters you love, because everyone’s a redshirt. Okay that all makes sense, but tons of your characters still have unique larger than life designs, what’s up with that?

Good question with a simple answer: Because the extreme can be taken two ways:

Here’s my comic’s 3 protagonists when compared to equals/peers of sorts. Noah (line 1) has a strong social uniformity due to him and other students from his story all wearing school outfits. They’re uniform because they have to be.  Tobi (line 2) has what I call a strong cultural uniformity, she’s from an isolated location with minimal outside influence on fashion and wardrobe + strong environmental influences.  Burk (line 3) is hard to pin down because he’s always on the move, aside from arguably camping him in with pseudo-nudists his peers are other hero-like characters like himself. Usually anyone of this status has quite a bit of fame, a lot of travel experience and *a lot* of freedom in choosing how they present themselves. Considering it’s usually not a role taken by people who’d rather not have notice taken of them this leads to more extravagant outfit/colour choices. The important thing I try to do is have these choices all be possible alongside eachother. Eventhough a character’s role & interests will obviously dictate who they’ll interact with, I never try to lose sight of the fact that every group, no matter how uniform or unique they might present themselves, is still a group compsed of different characters. The visuals simply que us in on how they present themselves. Faces. This brings me to the final point of this particular post, character’s faces. (and to a degree body type/race/etc)

Would you believe me if I told you these were all the same guy? As I mentioned earlier, changing a character’s clothes can indicate a change of attitude or role. But this does rely heavily on your character being unique enough to have a significant change in style/wardrobe without them turning out near-unrecognisable. And that brings us to an important point: If you give a villager clad in brown clothes a generic face you use over and over … spoilers: people know this character could never ever matter. And this isn’t a matter of actually making every villager significant, it’s a matter of not designing your world to feel centered around a few unique individuals while everyone else feels like a carbon copy extra in a low budget play. (high budget enough to clone identical twins*)

To summarise, these are some weak mooks at the start of Burk’s story. (weak, as in, Burk can take out 5 of them in one punch) If you asked a reader which one is Norman, they could tell you. Because Norman is allowed to have a recognisable face. Anyway that’s all. 1. As always, this is just my opinion & some insight into my thought process when designing characters, as I often hear people asking about it. I’m not saying how I do it is the best way/ideal or that other methods are a sin against creativity. Thanks for reading and I hope it helps some people out!

Height comparison chart of some characters from chapter 1 of my pixelart webcomic, Hero Oh Hero.

Check it out @ www.neorice.com

Sketches/wip of Burk and Logan Alexander from @neorice’s webcomic Hero oh Hero. I’ll color them later, I’m guessing vectors will do.

Fanart for Burk & Logan from my webcomic! By Samolo! Thank you so much <3

I need to post art more often, but I’ve been so busy with school recently. Here’s just a fun little thing; a little step-by-step how I go around adding new poses for characters from my webcomic ( www.neorice.com ); As I have hundreds of poses and expressions I tend to go for a rather quick creation method, pose changes like this usually take me 2-3 minutes tops. If you guys would like to see more little progress shots like this, let me know!

I probably spent like… . .15 (tops) minutes on this. It was awesome though. XD

I wanted to draw, so I found the ‘Psuedofolio Idea Generator’ and was gripping my sides after tumblring up (is that a verb?) a few drawing people had made previous. (Which are hilarious. You should look up the tag for them #randraw )

This features Burk, from the webcomic ‘Hero Oh Hero’ which is totally made of pixels and is graphically awesome and leaves you snerking (another new word?) at it’s humor… . .

Enjoy. :3

That seems in character.