Character Design Principles

so what makes a character design good this design took more time so it's good and this is a simple design so it's bad right well the answer is it's up to you character design is a subjective topic meaning that it varies wildly from person to person or story to story here at BAM we would argue that good character design is about clarity clarity of silhouette clarity of palette and clarity of exaggeration a character design that's clear in these three principles will be recognizable in any art style [Music] [Applause] [Music] BAM is the show where professional animation artists redraw the art that you send in and if you like supporting that sort of thing check out our patreon linked below let's start this off by creating an inherently bad character design we'll begin with a messy silhouette a confusing palette and a bland generic everything else wow that stinks let's go ahead and completely cover this design in detail that'll make it a nightmare to redraw again and can you imagine those overseas animators actually trying to animate this let's make sure all of these shapes have tangents to no sense of 3d space whatsoever and as a final touch I'm never going to flip the canvas while I draw so everything will lean awkwardly to one side perfect all these conflicting elements will confuse the viewer they'll get caught up in this visual traffic and the story will disappear completely good character design should be a seamless vehicle that drives the story forward and everything about that character should be understood visually in 1 second or less let's explore these three fundamentals and see if we can use them to create clear readable characters that aid the story instead of hinder it when you strip down your character to just black the rule is your character must be recognizable from that alone [Music] there isn't a single famous character that doesn't follow this rule this submitted artwork is looking really good but we can improve the design simply by examining the silhouette and separating some of these shapes now that the shapes are clear in silhouette they'll definitely be clear in full color all of the most iconic character designs have a silhouette that's made of big identifiable shapes big shapes are going to visually communicate the personality of the character using something called [Music] shaped language like this is already giving you a sense of stability trust and stubbornness in the shape here friendly bouncy soft welcoming warm and happy and this shape has the sharpest corners of the three implying things like edginess danger intensity and speed even though this is a nice drawing this artwork has a lot of conflicting shape ideas we can improve this design by making some of these shapes bigger and committing to the shape motif of a triangle when we choose a shape motif it reduces clutter and emphasizes the things we want to emphasize I'm going to try and make every shape some type of triangle by committing to an angular shape language this character will read immediately as a dangerous femme fatale you might think that big identifiable shapes can only work in cartoony art styles but you'd be surprised how many more realistic art styles follow the same rule usually it occurs in the form of big clothing hair or weapons another way to improve silhouette clarity is to take the character's head and add a little weird shape that is unique to only them this is a really useful design hack that helps identify them in a crowd and demonstrates the direction that they're facing every character design works better if you can recognize them from just the silhouette hands look bad improve the silhouette poses wack improve the silhouette before you clean up your character reduce it to just black and double check which shapes you can push to make it more iconic for clarity of palette don't use too many colors be selective choose a color hierarchy meaning one color is the dominant one and the other colors should support it without competing this fan submitted artwork has a lot of competing colors this blue and this turquoise are both cool colors without line art how can I tell where the ear ends and the dress begins if we were to turn the dress into a warmer color it becomes the dominant color that complements the blue instead of competing with it but wait color is more complicated than that what about value on a new layer fill the entire canvas white and set the layer style to color this way you can toggle the layer on and off to double check its value which is basically the brightness of any given color now we can see what the real issue is this design is unclear because all the values are very similar let's select some of these shapes and hit control u to adjust the value of them an even more precise tool would be the color balance menu under command B this allows you to adjust the color on a more fine-tuned level if you have a background check the colors against the environment don't just paint your characters on white characters rarely sand in a bright white room if you don't have a background do your design against a mid-tone that way your lights and darks will actually stand off [Music] in the original artwork many of the values compete and the character doesn't really stand off the background by making the values of the objects in the distance lighter we can establish atmospheric perspective this will create more contrast between the foreground and the background a value structure like this will make the foreground will read clearer character palette is similar to silhouette in that a well-designed palette is totally recognizable from rectangular swatches alone the combination of a good silhouette and a good palette equals an extremely recognizable character the choices of your color palette are important as well certain colors evoke certain moods the color language is telling us a lot about these characters for example we associate yellow with joy and happiness green is going to give you a feeling of safety while red might feel dangerous and sexy however color language is not as clear as shape language yellow might give you a really happy feeling like sunshine or a really sick and diseased feeling like jaundice if you take a look at the globe countries closer to the equator are going to have more colorful clothing and artwork [Music] while countries closer to the polls will have more muted clothing and artwork [Music] color can act as a signifier of the environment that the character comes from in other words color tells a story but how can I make that story more meaningful this is the hardest to explain but it is the most powerful step of the character design process in a nutshell your job as an artist is to interpret reality through the lens of being human you're a human and you make art for other humans therefore you should aim to create something that connects emotionally to the viewers core human instincts the artist has the ability to strip down detail push the proportions and bump up the color to connect the viewer directly with the feeling that a character gives you which of these do you connect with more one is more realistic but which one's emotion reads clearer designing characters with simple easy to read features will allow us to see that characters emotion more easily we have empathy for characters that we can project ourselves on to and put ourselves into their shoes Scott McCloud calls this the masking effect a good character designer is a world-class observer they pay attention to how a real person or animal makes them feel and focus in on the specific characteristics that amplify that feeling and because an artist controls a hundred percent of the screen space every detail will strengthen the feeling that they want you to read which means animation can be more powerful than live action pose is a form of exaggeration is your character feminine or masculine extroverted or introverted lazy or focused a standard human body is capable of telling the story with pose alone when you design a character don't just use the normal proportions textbook Anatomy for everybody oh yeah animating comics do that all the time this design approach doesn't use the full range of possibilities that the medium of animation allows there are so many different body types in the world [Music] take a look at this weightlifter versus this basketball player humans have the same core structure but vary wildly from individual to individual what kind of utility does their body have a body is a reflection of the mind within so observe reflect exaggerate that utility using shapes and pose let's exaggerate this submitted design by Joel we like this drawing because there's clearly a goofy interaction here we just think the actual designs are a bit generic and we want to keep the same poses in same art style but exaggerate the body types to amplify the story more first of all Joel watch out for these tangents here they flatten the drawing a lot it's hard to tell that the demon is behind him now we're gonna push the contrast more between these two characters we're gonna make this guy's super thin poised and intelligent and this guy's super big intimidating and stupid the contrast is going to aid the joke in the interaction [Music] nice characters bodies are generally made of three major shapes and the scale difference between those shapes is what makes the character design appealing or not appealing notice the more dynamic spacing is more appealing if your character design is starting to feel bland draw these lines on your character group them in a more dynamic way and redraw it these are like appeal rulers that you can always use to double-check your design let's take a look at some of these designs submitted by a gay from Turkey we really like a lot of what's going on here the designs are simple and the artist actually designed on a lineup drawing on separate documents over a white void can lead to a lot of proportion issues when the characters are finally lined up together when you design on the same document within a lineup it allows you to compare their proportions and be more precise a great exercise when designing in a lineup is to create character trios using all the lessons we've learned so far we can create a trio of characters that are drastically different from one another in silhouette palette shape motif body variety and pose so the challenge is even with all these differences can they exist in the same universe lineups with good variety will feel like a rollercoaster bad lineups will be a boring train track [Music] [Music] [Music] so what's the best way to exaggerate your characters more effectively gather reference and that doesn't mean just browsing through Pinterest it means all of this clarity of exaggeration comes from your understanding of story having good reference is going to help you explore every possible idea to find the best possible way to aid the story so it's always worth your time the best storytellers are the ones who actually have a story to tell what really makes a good character design I've been working for years in the animation industry and my honest answer is I have no idea what I can gather is that designs with clear silhouettes and recognizable palettes and some kind of exaggeration tend to last for a long time in our human zeitgeist and the final ingredient to every design is story what you're really doing is creating an actor professionally speaking spending time trying to find your own unique drawing style isn't as good a goal as spending time learning to draw in different styles professional character designers change their art style constantly to best emphasize the meaning behind every project that they're working on shows like South Park would be bad if you delivered the same jokes in the same story in an overly rendered style the show's writing is crude and silly and it doesn't take itself too seriously and the style reflects that perfectly you might not like that style but it's an example extremely successful design and vice versa a story like grave of the fireflies could not be told in a style like South Park's personally I think the best design is like a Beatle song it's a very simple melody but the unique execution is what it makes it shine the song Blackbird is an exact amount of melody harmony and guitar and the moment you add anything else the song is ruined the real trick to character design is to go with a simple idea executed well simple designs encourage the animators to have fun you don't want to bog them down with a bunch of patterns and pockets now before you go check out our friends YouTube channel Joop is a freelance illustrator with a fantastic video that explores the fundamentals of character design in great depth there's another example of this I don't know maybe you've heard of it it's called that who's that Pokemon every Pokemon has unique silhouette and you can pretty much tell who the Pokemon is just by its silhouette with the exception of like to an animation is the best animation history channel on YouTube such quality writing and production value action in western animation of the 1990s and 2000's was dominated by a realistic style fluid motions that fed toward a character's final stance posing was considered of course but the action was very slow almost brutish with Ganley spacing of the motion is far more concise the posing is highlighted with keyframes and then in between this sped up so our eyes register a longer held pose and his Irish accent is like listening to to butter and thanks for watching now technically this is the end of the original 12 videos that we plan to do on this channel so this is the end of BAM just kidding we love doing this so we'll be back soon with more videos season two back friends BAM forever 100 years a hundred years of BAM yes I will live to a hundred and thirty years old and then we'll 100 years of BAM I'm going to clone my own body and raise the clone in my image training him day after day to edit videos draw you know redraw that's what the whole channel is about redrawing people's art I'll mold him in my image and when I die he'll hate me he'll resent me but he will be motivated by guilt to continue the channel therefore for your viewing pleasure aren't all channels motivated by guilt oh yeah yeah especially this one yeah yeah I'm going to train an AI BOTS by making it read a thousand hours of BAM scripts that's smart yeah yeah yeah so it'll say like hey welcome to BAM it's the show where you BAM da redraw my this is my Wacom pen a gmail dot mail yes yes love it cool are we going to brand more videos they're coming okay

so what makes a character design good this design took more time so it&#39;s good and this is a simple design so it&#39;s bad right well the answer is it&#39;s up to you character design is a subjective topic meaning that it varies wildly from person to person or story to story here at BAM we would argue that good character design is about clarity clarity of silhouette clarity of palette and clarity of exaggeration a character design that&#39;s clear in these three principles will be recognizable in any art style [Music] [Applause] [Music] BAM is the show where professional animation artists redraw the art that you send in and if you like supporting that sort of thing check out our patreon linked below let&#39;s start this off by creating an inherently bad character design we&#39;ll begin with a messy silhouette a confusing palette and a bland generic everything else wow that stinks let&#39;s go ahead and completely cover this design in detail that&#39;ll make it a nightmare to redraw again and can you imagine those overseas animators actually trying to animate this let&#39;s make sure all of these shapes have tangents to no sense of 3d space whatsoever and as a final touch I&#39;m never going to flip the canvas while I draw so everything will lean awkwardly to one side perfect all these conflicting elements will confuse the viewer they&#39;ll get caught up in this visual traffic and the story will disappear completely good character design should be a seamless vehicle that drives the story forward and everything about that character should be understood visually in 1 second or less let&#39;s explore these three fundamentals and see if we can use them to create clear readable characters that aid the story instead of hinder it when you strip down your character to just black the rule is your character must be recognizable from that alone [Music] there isn&#39;t a single famous character that doesn&#39;t follow this rule this submitted artwork is looking really good but we can improve the design simply by examining the silhouette and separating some of these shapes now that the shapes are clear in silhouette they&#39;ll definitely be clear in full color all of the most iconic character designs have a silhouette that&#39;s made of big identifiable shapes big shapes are going to visually communicate the personality of the character using something called [Music] shaped language like this is already giving you a sense of stability trust and stubbornness in the shape here friendly bouncy soft welcoming warm and happy and this shape has the sharpest corners of the three implying things like edginess danger intensity and speed even though this is a nice drawing this artwork has a lot of conflicting shape ideas we can improve this design by making some of these shapes bigger and committing to the shape motif of a triangle when we choose a shape motif it reduces clutter and emphasizes the things we want to emphasize I&#39;m going to try and make every shape some type of triangle by committing to an angular shape language this character will read immediately as a dangerous femme fatale you might think that big identifiable shapes can only work in cartoony art styles but you&#39;d be surprised how many more realistic art styles follow the same rule usually it occurs in the form of big clothing hair or weapons another way to improve silhouette clarity is to take the character&#39;s head and add a little weird shape that is unique to only them this is a really useful design hack that helps identify them in a crowd and demonstrates the direction that they&#39;re facing every character design works better if you can recognize them from just the silhouette hands look bad improve the silhouette poses wack improve the silhouette before you clean up your character reduce it to just black and double check which shapes you can push to make it more iconic for clarity of palette don&#39;t use too many colors be selective choose a color hierarchy meaning one color is the dominant one and the other colors should support it without competing this fan submitted artwork has a lot of competing colors this blue and this turquoise are both cool colors without line art how can I tell where the ear ends and the dress begins if we were to turn the dress into a warmer color it becomes the dominant color that complements the blue instead of competing with it but wait color is more complicated than that what about value on a new layer fill the entire canvas white and set the layer style to color this way you can toggle the layer on and off to double check its value which is basically the brightness of any given color now we can see what the real issue is this design is unclear because all the values are very similar let&#39;s select some of these shapes and hit control u to adjust the value of them an even more precise tool would be the color balance menu under command B this allows you to adjust the color on a more fine-tuned level if you have a background check the colors against the environment don&#39;t just paint your characters on white characters rarely sand in a bright white room if you don&#39;t have a background do your design against a mid-tone that way your lights and darks will actually stand off [Music] in the original artwork many of the values compete and the character doesn&#39;t really stand off the background by making the values of the objects in the distance lighter we can establish atmospheric perspective this will create more contrast between the foreground and the background a value structure like this will make the foreground will read clearer character palette is similar to silhouette in that a well-designed palette is totally recognizable from rectangular swatches alone the combination of a good silhouette and a good palette equals an extremely recognizable character the choices of your color palette are important as well certain colors evoke certain moods the color language is telling us a lot about these characters for example we associate yellow with joy and happiness green is going to give you a feeling of safety while red might feel dangerous and sexy however color language is not as clear as shape language yellow might give you a really happy feeling like sunshine or a really sick and diseased feeling like jaundice if you take a look at the globe countries closer to the equator are going to have more colorful clothing and artwork [Music] while countries closer to the polls will have more muted clothing and artwork [Music] color can act as a signifier of the environment that the character comes from in other words color tells a story but how can I make that story more meaningful this is the hardest to explain but it is the most powerful step of the character design process in a nutshell your job as an artist is to interpret reality through the lens of being human you&#39;re a human and you make art for other humans therefore you should aim to create something that connects emotionally to the viewers core human instincts the artist has the ability to strip down detail push the proportions and bump up the color to connect the viewer directly with the feeling that a character gives you which of these do you connect with more one is more realistic but which one&#39;s emotion reads clearer designing characters with simple easy to read features will allow us to see that characters emotion more easily we have empathy for characters that we can project ourselves on to and put ourselves into their shoes Scott McCloud calls this the masking effect a good character designer is a world-class observer they pay attention to how a real person or animal makes them feel and focus in on the specific characteristics that amplify that feeling and because an artist controls a hundred percent of the screen space every detail will strengthen the feeling that they want you to read which means animation can be more powerful than live action pose is a form of exaggeration is your character feminine or masculine extroverted or introverted lazy or focused a standard human body is capable of telling the story with pose alone when you design a character don&#39;t just use the normal proportions textbook Anatomy for everybody oh yeah animating comics do that all the time this design approach doesn&#39;t use the full range of possibilities that the medium of animation allows there are so many different body types in the world [Music] take a look at this weightlifter versus this basketball player humans have the same core structure but vary wildly from individual to individual what kind of utility does their body have a body is a reflection of the mind within so observe reflect exaggerate that utility using shapes and pose let&#39;s exaggerate this submitted design by Joel we like this drawing because there&#39;s clearly a goofy interaction here we just think the actual designs are a bit generic and we want to keep the same poses in same art style but exaggerate the body types to amplify the story more first of all Joel watch out for these tangents here they flatten the drawing a lot it&#39;s hard to tell that the demon is behind him now we&#39;re gonna push the contrast more between these two characters we&#39;re gonna make this guy&#39;s super thin poised and intelligent and this guy&#39;s super big intimidating and stupid the contrast is going to aid the joke in the interaction [Music] nice characters bodies are generally made of three major shapes and the scale difference between those shapes is what makes the character design appealing or not appealing notice the more dynamic spacing is more appealing if your character design is starting to feel bland draw these lines on your character group them in a more dynamic way and redraw it these are like appeal rulers that you can always use to double-check your design let&#39;s take a look at some of these designs submitted by a gay from Turkey we really like a lot of what&#39;s going on here the designs are simple and the artist actually designed on a lineup drawing on separate documents over a white void can lead to a lot of proportion issues when the characters are finally lined up together when you design on the same document within a lineup it allows you to compare their proportions and be more precise a great exercise when designing in a lineup is to create character trios using all the lessons we&#39;ve learned so far we can create a trio of characters that are drastically different from one another in silhouette palette shape motif body variety and pose so the challenge is even with all these differences can they exist in the same universe lineups with good variety will feel like a rollercoaster bad lineups will be a boring train track [Music] [Music] [Music] so what&#39;s the best way to exaggerate your characters more effectively gather reference and that doesn&#39;t mean just browsing through Pinterest it means all of this clarity of exaggeration comes from your understanding of story having good reference is going to help you explore every possible idea to find the best possible way to aid the story so it&#39;s always worth your time the best storytellers are the ones who actually have a story to tell what really makes a good character design I&#39;ve been working for years in the animation industry and my honest answer is I have no idea what I can gather is that designs with clear silhouettes and recognizable palettes and some kind of exaggeration tend to last for a long time in our human zeitgeist and the final ingredient to every design is story what you&#39;re really doing is creating an actor professionally speaking spending time trying to find your own unique drawing style isn&#39;t as good a goal as spending time learning to draw in different styles professional character designers change their art style constantly to best emphasize the meaning behind every project that they&#39;re working on shows like South Park would be bad if you delivered the same jokes in the same story in an overly rendered style the show&#39;s writing is crude and silly and it doesn&#39;t take itself too seriously and the style reflects that perfectly you might not like that style but it&#39;s an example extremely successful design and vice versa a story like grave of the fireflies could not be told in a style like South Park&#39;s personally I think the best design is like a Beatle song it&#39;s a very simple melody but the unique execution is what it makes it shine the song Blackbird is an exact amount of melody harmony and guitar and the moment you add anything else the song is ruined the real trick to character design is to go with a simple idea executed well simple designs encourage the animators to have fun you don&#39;t want to bog them down with a bunch of patterns and pockets now before you go check out our friends YouTube channel Joop is a freelance illustrator with a fantastic video that explores the fundamentals of character design in great depth there&#39;s another example of this I don&#39;t know maybe you&#39;ve heard of it it&#39;s called that who&#39;s that Pokemon every Pokemon has unique silhouette and you can pretty much tell who the Pokemon is just by its silhouette with the exception of like to an animation is the best animation history channel on YouTube such quality writing and production value action in western animation of the 1990s and 2000&#39;s was dominated by a realistic style fluid motions that fed toward a character&#39;s final stance posing was considered of course but the action was very slow almost brutish with Ganley spacing of the motion is far more concise the posing is highlighted with keyframes and then in between this sped up so our eyes register a longer held pose and his Irish accent is like listening to to butter and thanks for watching now technically this is the end of the original 12 videos that we plan to do on this channel so this is the end of BAM just kidding we love doing this so we&#39;ll be back soon with more videos season two back friends BAM forever 100 years a hundred years of BAM yes I will live to a hundred and thirty years old and then we&#39;ll 100 years of BAM I&#39;m going to clone my own body and raise the clone in my image training him day after day to edit videos draw you know redraw that&#39;s what the whole channel is about redrawing people&#39;s art I&#39;ll mold him in my image and when I die he&#39;ll hate me he&#39;ll resent me but he will be motivated by guilt to continue the channel therefore for your viewing pleasure aren&#39;t all channels motivated by guilt oh yeah yeah especially this one yeah yeah I&#39;m going to train an AI BOTS by making it read a thousand hours of BAM scripts that&#39;s smart yeah yeah yeah so it&#39;ll say like hey welcome to BAM it&#39;s the show where you BAM da redraw my this is my Wacom pen a gmail dot mail yes yes love it cool are we going to brand more videos they&#39;re coming okay

Transcript for:Character Design Principles

Transcript for:
Character Design Principles