Creative character design pdf

Powered by. Badges Report an Issue Terms of Service. Co-production practitioners network A network for co-production practitioners. Blogs Forum. Co-production Email Dige. Creative character design pdf. Video game Download the Book:Creative Character Design PDF For Free, Preface: Create compelling, original characters using archetypes and design elements such as May 27, - Introduction to animal parasitology pdf Cara mengganti file word ke pdf printer Bildlektioner lgr 11 pdf Ramakrishna bani in bengali pdf Excitons pdf printer Corel draw complete reference pdf Manga pdf gratuit mac Manga pdf gratuit mac Merinews ipl schedule pdf Manga pdf gratuit mac.

Add a Comment You need to be a member of Co-production practitioners network to add comments! Thanks to the wide availability of the Internet all over the world, it is now possible to instantly share any file with people from all corners of the globe. On the one hand, it is a positive development, but on the other hand, this ease of sharing makes it tempting to create simple websites with badly organized databases which make users confused or even frustrated.

Whether you are looking for a handbook or a rare ebook, the chances are that they are available for downloading from our website in txt, DjVu, ePub, PDF formats.

You no longer need to visit the local libraries or browse endless online catalogs to find Creative Character Design by Bryan Tillman. Can you imagine what our world would be like if the wheel had never been invented? As I said before, it is hard to be original. So my advice is to make sure you have some form of originality in everything you create. It is a lot easier to obtain originality than to be original.

Now I know what some of you might be thinking: Well, let me tell you something that I was told a while back. What this means is that we are all inspired by the things around us. If we like something, we want to see it again and again.

That is why, when we are in the creative mode, we generally pull all of our inspiration from the things we think are cool. Here is a little scenario of what might happen to you as an artist to put this idea of originality to the test. Somebody would like you to develop the next big character for his or her company. You are very excited about this opportunity, and you ask what the character should look like. The new story is going to be about another fire person, but it should be different from the first one—just as cool, but different.

Do you understand? Later, when the phone rings, you have this sinking feeling that someone is going to ask you to draw another fire person. Well, you were right. But then you remind yourself that the money is good, so you are going to keep designing fire people if that is what everyone wants to see.

You think to yourself that you will design one last fire person and then retire. Not to mention you were also able to take what you already drew and build on it. You were able to put your own twist on a character design over and over again. Were you able to see that? Jim was a normal man who loved eating bread. This is going to be awesome! He had never worked so hard on anything in his life, but he knew this was going to be one of the best things he ever did.

All that time and effort for nothing! Jim was beside himself. Once he calmed down, however, he started thinking about how he could still make something out of all the work he had put into his toaster idea. Did you notice the other important message in this story? If not, read it again and see if you can find it. Did you figure it out? At the beginning of the story Jim had this great idea and started working on it right away, but before he could get it finished, someone else completed the invention and sold it to a major company.

What does that tell us? It tells us that there are many great ideas out there in the universe and even more people grabbing at those ideas. Not at all! It just means that once you have a good idea, you have to hit the ground running and finish your project to the best of your ability as fast as you can. Knowing how easy it would be for them to just look around and copy something they liked, I told them the character had to be an original creation.

The next day, the class started and things were going just fine. The students presented their characters in front of the class. Some were good, and some were not so good. For the most part, however, they all showed evidence of originality.

Then came the student who was going to change all that. With confidence he strolled to the front of the class. When he showed the class his character, the silence was deafening. It was up to me to let the student know that this character had been done before. He insisted that it was completely original. I proceeded to tell him how a female winged demon with a tail had been done by many artists in a multitude of stories.

Even after I told him where to find them, he refused to acknowledge that anyone had created this character before. So I took it one step further and told him that he should have done some research first because that character also appears in various types of mythology. At this point, the tension in the room was so thick you could cut it with a knife.

The final straw came when he admitted that the character was not original, but the weapon that he had created was completely original and that no one had ever seen anything like it.

I had to tell him that he was wrong yet again. The weapon he had drawn had indeed been created before. Known as a sai, peasants in Okinawa, Japan, used it as both a weapon and a farming tool.

Also, always make sure you research the subject matter you are working on this is covered in Chapter 6. I hope that after reading this chapter you completely understand the difference between being original and having originality. Take five characters you enjoy looking at and put your own twist on them. See what you can come up with, and try to have some fun with it. Try not to overthink things. See you in the next chapter.

Chapter 5 Shapes and Silhouettes Did you have fun with the last assignment? Now I want to talk about shapes. Shapes are what we fundamentally use to define what certain things are and what they possibly can be used for. If cavemen had decided that a square was better for mobility and movement, we would be using squares on our cars instead circles. Luckily for us, they decided to go with the circle. I hope you see a square, but what does this shape tell you about itself?

If this shape was the dominate shape in your character, what would it say about the character? Any ideas? Generally, when we look at a square, certain terms should come to mind: Stability Trust Honesty Order Conformity Security Equality Masculinity These are the most common things people think about when they see a square shape.

This character has a so-called square jaw. Now that you know some of the meanings behind a square, do you see any of them in this character? At this point you are probably going through all the shapes you know and trying to figure out the meanings behind them. Or you might be trying to figure out if this works with any other shapes. What do you think the triangle is trying to convey?

What did you think about the character when you saw him? Did it match up with some of the meanings that were mentioned earlier?

Can you think of some of the meanings behind a circle? What do you think a circle could possibly be telling us about itself? Do you see any of the meanings in this character? That is fine, but you have to know that, depending on what shapes you use, you might be telling a different story with your character designs than you think you are. Was it harder to do than with faces?

When you start embellishing the shapes to make them more interesting, you must always keep in mind what the basic shapes are saying. No matter what else you do to the basic shape, it will always be the most prominent feature.

So, for example, if you have rounded triangles like the previous character, most people will interpret that as a form of protection that allows the character to be aggressive. So you have both a protection meaning from a circle and an aggression meaning from a triangle. Cool how that worked out, huh? At this point you might be asking yourself this question: Well, as long as you know what you are trying to say about your character, you will know what basic shape to use for your character.

You are probably going to want to augment some of those shapes to make them cooler looking. The best way to do that is to use a silhouette. It kind of looks like a shadow. If you can create a character with a combination of shapes that is completely recognizable when it is in complete shadow, then you are doing something right.

Try to think of some characters that have good silhouettes. This character has the best silhouette of all time. Interested in knowing who it is? He likes dogs.

Any thoughts? He is represented by three circles. How about now? Still nothing? Okay, here is one last clue: He lives in a magical kingdom. I hope you know the answer by now. Once you figure out who the character with the best silhouette is you should be able to see how much a strong silhouette can help with recognition.

Using a silhouette is also a very good starting point for character design. Remember what I said about form follows function? What that all boils down to is that no matter how cool your design looks, it should always look like it would work. I have to say that artists not following this rule is one of my biggest pet peeves. Why, you ask? Elementary, my dear Watson!

If a person has to ask that question about your design, it is going to pull that person out of the story you created and destroy any allure that you might have had for your character.

Let me give you some examples using three different form follows function items: Spiked arm bracelets Four arms mutations Robots In the s, character designers seemed to use spiked arm bracelets a lot.

The whole idea behind the bracelets is actually pretty cool. It makes for a very intimidating look. If the bracelet has spikes all the way around, every time a character puts his or her arms down, he or she is going to get stabbed!

Everyone wants to create a character who can hold more weapons than a normal human, so naturally the character is given more arms. This is what I generally see when students and young character designers approach this design challenge: As cool as this might look, there is a big problem with this character. Notice that the arm is a ball and socket. The head of the humerus fits into the socket of the scapula, which allows the arm to rotate. The scapula has the acromion process and the coracoids process where muscles attach to help move the arm.

Then there is the clavicle, the suprasternal notch, and the sternum, which all have muscles attached to them. All of these things are required for an arm to be capable of movement. If we just slap on a couple of more arms, there would be too many other vital parts missing. So how can we fix this design problem? We just have to double up on everything that is needed to make the arms work. Not all design choices can follow the form follows function rule.

Sometimes you need to know when to walk away from a design you have created. Another character design where people can forget about the functionality of a character is an angel. Most designers just put wings on the shoulders or coming out of the back.

The last thing I want to talk about is robots. I know that robots are probably the coolest of the three examples, but they are the easiest to screw up as well. Robots are basically big moving shapes. For these shapes to move, all the parts have to work together. Remember the toy where you put the square block in the square hole and the star shape in the star hole? The shapes have to work with one another for the robot character to be believable.

Robots, at their core, are the epitome of form follows function. Or at least they should be. They are working together to form a believable character design. I hope you can now see how form follows function is supposed to work. It is simple when you think about it. Whether you are designing angels, cops, robots, ninjas, or anything else that you can think of, just remember that whatever you create has to look like it would work. Now, on to your homework! Go ahead and design a character and then change the primary shapes in your character.

See if that changes anything about your character. You might discover that simply changing the shapes gives your character the story you were looking for. Did you do your homework? I will just have to take your word for it, because there is still more to be told about character design. The next thing we are going to talk about is reference. Say you have designed your main character, and his sidekick is a bobcat. To ensure that your portrayal of a bobcat is correct, you would need a reference.

To obtain a good reference, you could go about it a couple of ways. You could go to the zoo and draw or take pictures of a live bobcat. Or if by chance you have wild bobcats in your backyard, you could draw or take pictures of them. If you did, you need to get them out of your head right now! And using reference is definitely not cheating. All professional character designers use reference.

Whether you are revamping old characters or creating brand new ones, references are vital because you have to make sure that everything on your character is accurate. A large majority of character designs involve some form of the human body. The best source of practice and references will always be life drawing. Au contraire, young grasshopper. When you draw from life, you are referencing the real world around you. You have to look at what you are drawing to make sure that what you are drawing is correct.

To prove my point, here are some sketches from a life drawing session. Everywhere you go, there are people you can draw—on the bus, at school, at the bowling alley, the friends playing video games with you.

The reference you need is all around you. I personally like drawing people on the Metro train. Reference, Reference, and Reference—Oh My! And once you understand human anatomy, you should probably learn to draw people with their clothes on.

How many characters have you created in the past that walk around living out their lives naked? At this point, I bet you have this thought running through your head.

Drawing people who are moving gives you practice at remembering what it was that you were looking at. It is a good skill to have. After you draw for a while, you will notice that you are able to fill in the gaps, but that will only happen if you practice. Another great skill you will learn by drawing people on the bus or walking around in the mall is gesture drawing. Gesture drawing is a form of quick drawing that allows you to focus on the motion, the energy, and the mood of what you are drawing.

These drawings will make you draw faster so you can capture the energy and mood of the people in motion. If you can become proficient in gesture drawing, your character designs have less of a chance of becoming stiff and lifeless. If you are still intimidated about drawing strangers on the bus or in the park, I know someone with whom you will always feel comfortable and who will always be at your beck and call.

This individual will pose any way you like for as long as you want. Are you ready for this great resource? You are the best model you will ever have. You will always be there, and you know exactly what you are looking for. Here are some examples of me being my own model.

Drawing yourself can also teach you how to remember what you see because, believe me, as great a model as you might be, you are still going to move. With yourself as the model, you can pretty much have any type of reference pose you want. Of course, it will be hard to hold still while you are drawing, so you might want to get one of your friends to take a picture of you posing. The Internet is also a great resource for photo references. You can download millions of pictures that other people have taken.

Being able to get any person to hold any pose for an infinite amount of time is invaluable, but there is a downside to photo references. Can you guess what it is? There is a problem with photo reference. The problem with photo reference is that the camera makes all the choices for you. Let me give you an example. I once had a student who turned in a final project that looked absolutely amazing. The details, the story, and the color were spectacular.

Once I got past the outer beauty, however, I realized that the perspective was completely off. This student was a slave to his photographs. He was able to make the picture look really good, but the camera had warped the perspective, and the student had just drawn what he saw in the photo, neglecting to work out the perspective and making sure it was correct. The best way to combat being a slave to your reference is to do a butt load of life drawing.

When it comes to reference, the best one will always be life drawing. By doing a lot of life drawing, you will be able to build your visual library, which will allow you to fill in the gaps that the camera might miss or distort. Here are some examples of how you can use reference without being a slave to them. The idea is to use what you need and be creative with the rest. For example, here is a headshot of me screaming.

Notice how the pose is similar but not exactly the same. The character pose needed both arms to be straight out, but I have to say that gun was pretty heavy!

I hope so. Just make sure the final product is your own creation and not be a slave to your reference. I mean the research you need to do for a specific character. It might sound like an awful lot of work for just one character, but it is incumbent upon you to produce something that is absolutely authentic.

And the only way you can do that is with research. The same thing holds true when you draw characters with special abilities. For instance, if your character is a parkour specialist, then you would have to research how a person who has mastered parkour moves. You could go to a studio that teaches parkour and do a bunch of life drawings, but we already talked about the problem of people in motion.

So it would be a lot easier to go online and look at videos and photos of people performing parkour, right? This type of reference is often not considered a true reference at all. I understand why, but I think that it is another strong type of reference. You never want to assume that the other artist did all the work he or she should have. When you do your own research, you know it is right.

Have you ever found an image on a poster or online that inspired you to start drawing something similar? I know I have. I think it was supposed to be a female Thor. It looked so awesome that I took a picture of it.

When I got back to my hotel room, I printed out a couple of images of Vikings from the computer. It had something to do with sailing and rigging and stuff getting caught on the horns.

Who knew? So it happens to everyone. That is why I went back to the hotel and printed my own Viking reference, and for three other reasons. One, I needed more Viking reference. Two, I wanted to make sure that the inspirational image was correct. I hope you are now convinced that reference is a very useful and powerful tool to have at your fingertips. Got it? This time, I want you to make two different drawings of the same character: a sheriff in the Wild West.

One drawing should just be from the top of your head, using no reference at all. For the other one, I want you to use all four types of references discussed in this chapter.

Afterward, compare the drawings and see if there are any differences. Did you notice anything in particular about your drawings? I hope it has encouraged you to use reference a lot more. I am not going to waste any more time. We are going to jump right into aesthetics. I know we discussed aesthetics briefly when we talked about shapes, but that was mostly about structure. Now we are going to get to the meat and potatoes. The aesthetic is the first thing the viewer will notice about your character design.

No matter what anyone wants to tell you, human beings are attracted to things that look visually appealing. When they see an attractive character, people want to know more about it. There is no cookie cutter formula that will always make your character appealing to everyone on the planet. You just have to find it. So how can you get the most bang for your buck when it comes to the aesthetics of your characters? The first thing you have to think about is your audience.

If you are creating the character only for yourself, then all you have to worry about is what you like. But if you are trying to reach other people, you have to consider the preferences of the other people who will see your character design. You have to answer two important questions: 1. What is the age group that you are aiming for with your character design?

What genre is your character going to be in? You will have to do some research to see what the target age group is watching, playing, and reading. You might think you know, but do you really know? I am going to break down the age groups as follows. This may vary from person to person, but this is generally what I go by. Their eyes are smaller, the colors are a bit more muted, and the shapes are more intricate. They resemble more believable proportions.

The colors are more realistic and have a lot more details. They are properly proportioned. The colors are more complicated, and they have the most amount of detail. Why is this important and why should you care?

For example, look at what a 4-year-old is watching and then look at what a year-old is watching. There is more they have to process. This is because the older you get, the more information your brain can process.

Imagine being the artist who has this great idea about a bloodthirsty mercenary who specializes in killing demons and monsters, and his main quest is to hunt down and kill the devil. So you want to make sure that your character is going to fit in with the age group you have in mind. First, we are going to look at a character in the 0- to 4-year-old group. If we break this character down, you will see that the character is only two heads tall, with the largest part of the character being its head.

The idea behind the big head and big eyes is to make the character cute and less threatening. Also, if you look at the lines that were used to define the character, they are very minimalistic. Finally, notice that the colors are very basic—basic in the sense that they are all part of the basic color wheel. There are no shades or tints to any of the colors here. As character designers, we would choose these colors because they are what the age group is learning about.

That would come later if he develops an interest in art. Which brings us to the 5- to 8-year-old group. Not by leaps and bounds, but enough to be noticeable. The head size has become a bit more realistic. The details have become a bit more evident. So we get to see a few more things that define who the character is. The colors are also a bit more advanced and require more of an understanding of color theory.

We are getting deeper into what and who the character is. Everything changes in this age group. Kids this age are finding out about the world around them, and they are curious about everything. At this point they should have the mental capacity to understand and comprehend what is put in front of them. The line detail and color have become more sophisticated.

This is because most artists designing for this age group understand that these kids are well on their way to becoming adults. Here, let me show you. At this age people have a fairly decent grasp on what is going on around them.

So they want what they are looking at, whether it is fantasy, sci-fi, horror, or whatever, to be rooted in reality as much as possible. There are always exceptions, but as a general rule, you can count on this being true. That is why the younger ages are modeled with childlike proportions and the older age groups want something more adult. The thing you have to remember is that each genre has very specific qualities that fans of that specific genre want to see every time.

So if you are going to be doing a fantasy story, your characters must have some mystical qualities about them. They probably also have to fight dragons, orcs, and goblins.

If you are doing a western story, your characters have to be willing to get on a horse and wear a cowboy hat. Once again, there are always going to be exceptions, but genres are based off generalizations.

So make sure you know the subject matter of the genre in which you are going to place your characters. Color says a lot about a character and his story. It also affects whether a person will have a connection to a certain character.

People tend to gravitate toward other people who like the same things they do. Color is one of the things that people tend to gravitate to, it is a mnemonic device that easily works, which you will see later. So it is very important to know the meanings of the colors you use. Complementary colors are directly across from each other, so red is the complementary color of green, and blue is the complementary color of orange, and so on. Now here are the colors that we are going to be looking at in depth: Red Yellow Blue Purple Green Orange Black White Basically we are going to talk about the color wheel plus black and white.