Character Design
Since I am a person that like to create characters whether it be just for art or dungeons or dragons or whatever project I'm working on, I wanted to look into some ideas as to what makes a character's physical design work well. I decided that I would take a look at some of my favorite character designs to gather inspiration from.
The first character I decided to look at is Undyne from the game Undertale. The thing that stands out first to me as making her a unique character is that we don't quite have an exact answer to what sort of creature she is. Obviously making a character not based on any existing thing is a risk but in this case it's a risk that payed off. Nowhere else have I seen a bipedal fish-person hybrid creature which already makes this character very distinct from everything else. The other thing that stands out to me is that you can look at this character and already have an idea for what kind of personality she has. She looks tough and like she's ready to fight. Just being able to gather that information from her pixelated sprite is impressive to me.
The next character is one that I wanted to look at for the total opposite reasons. Unlike Undyne who is truly something that has never existed before, Shaggy is just a regular guy. Shaggy's design is ingeniously simple for a few basic reasons. Shaggy looks normal. He looks like the guy you would know from high school and that's why his character works so well. Everyone knows someone like Shaggy. His signature walk cycle makes him look goofy and not too serious which is something everyone loves about him as well.
Finally I wanted to include one of my other favorite strong female characters. I wanted to include Toph from Avatar the Last Airbender because she has some very unique traits that I am glad to see in a character. Toph is blind so her eyes have a haze over them and she goes barefoot to feel the surroundings around her. Including disabilities like this in media is important for representation and to have characters that aren't always the same, Aside from these traits that were included in her physical appearance, I like that she really only has a few colors she wears. All the characters in Avatar wear the colors of their tribe which I think was a very smart idea of the designers because no one is too hard to look at and their simple dress matches their living habits.
After looking at some of my favorite characters across shows and games I have narrowed it down to some essentials that I'll remind myself of
The first character I decided to look at is Undyne from the game Undertale. The thing that stands out first to me as making her a unique character is that we don't quite have an exact answer to what sort of creature she is. Obviously making a character not based on any existing thing is a risk but in this case it's a risk that payed off. Nowhere else have I seen a bipedal fish-person hybrid creature which already makes this character very distinct from everything else. The other thing that stands out to me is that you can look at this character and already have an idea for what kind of personality she has. She looks tough and like she's ready to fight. Just being able to gather that information from her pixelated sprite is impressive to me.
The next character is one that I wanted to look at for the total opposite reasons. Unlike Undyne who is truly something that has never existed before, Shaggy is just a regular guy. Shaggy's design is ingeniously simple for a few basic reasons. Shaggy looks normal. He looks like the guy you would know from high school and that's why his character works so well. Everyone knows someone like Shaggy. His signature walk cycle makes him look goofy and not too serious which is something everyone loves about him as well.
Finally I wanted to include one of my other favorite strong female characters. I wanted to include Toph from Avatar the Last Airbender because she has some very unique traits that I am glad to see in a character. Toph is blind so her eyes have a haze over them and she goes barefoot to feel the surroundings around her. Including disabilities like this in media is important for representation and to have characters that aren't always the same, Aside from these traits that were included in her physical appearance, I like that she really only has a few colors she wears. All the characters in Avatar wear the colors of their tribe which I think was a very smart idea of the designers because no one is too hard to look at and their simple dress matches their living habits.
After looking at some of my favorite characters across shows and games I have narrowed it down to some essentials that I'll remind myself of
- Although unique is what you want it's okay to keep it simple
- A limited color palette makes a character look more cohesive
- you should be able to get parts of a character's personality across if it is an effective design
Next week I hope to look at some of my own character designs and critique them based off this information.
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