#i cant keep crying in my replies everyone will know im a huge weenie so im trying to stay on topicsldkfsdf | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

missusruin · 3 years

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Hi! Sorry if you've already been asked this before but, do you have any advice for creating unique looking characters? Mine always tend to look kind of boring, I struggle with coming up with ways to make them look cool. I really admire how awesome all of your characters look and inspire to be able to make cool designs like you :)

I sat down to answer this but then ended up overthinking it and now I don’t know how to answer without 10 pages of me rambling otl. Like there’s so many facets to design; technical drawing skills, shape language, communicating story/personality/etc, breaking down styles you like to figure out ‘why’ you like them, learning to love a wide variety of traits/features, absorbing media that has a wide variety of characters, identifying and expanding your general interests, saving and studying images, etc etc.

The tldr is kinda just “i make characters I personally think are cool”. I like a lot of stuff and I’m very cognizant of the things I like. But also I realize “idk, if your oc looks boring to you, add stuff you think is cool” or “if your ocs have the same face, draw a different face” is kinda an obtuse reply lol.

Anyway I save images that give me ideas so I can go back to them for reference/study. It’s what I’ve always done, and I was actually super surprised to learn that not every artist does this? I think it’s hard to design anything if you don’t have a good library of things to pull inspiration from. Like the biggest tldr for any design questions I get can probably just be:

And these are just my main ‘general’ insp categories.

#missusruin replies #this isn't a very good answer at all lol im never sure how to answer vague stuff like this #i think as an artist its most important to look at art and ask yourself what you like and why #anyway there are entire classes on character design for a reason #asking how to design well is like asking how to draw well in terms of like scope #it's also super subject to opinion since what i think is cool might not be cool to someone else #ps telling me u like my ocs is like literally the nicest thing you can say to me lmfao #i cant keep crying in my replies everyone will know im a huge weenie so im trying to stay on topicsldkfsdf

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