What makes a great character design

Ah character design, my forté. When I create characters it allows me to express my inner creativity, this allows me breathe life into the inhabitants that populate my fictional world. I find it just so fascinating that a "good" character designer can create a well designed character that has its own personality and style but a "great" character designer can make that fictional character believable as a person. So what makes a great character design?

Character Design is the process of illustrating the personality and physical appearance of a fictional character onto paper (or whatever you like). From the sound of it you might be thinking "that sounds simple enough how is that hard?", well I like to break down a character design into four key points.

· Personality
· Vibe
· Aesthetic
· Theme

I'll be using one my recent artworks to reference these points

PERSONALITY
When I start character creation I like to start creating a personality for my chosen character either from inspiration from Tv shows and films or they just come to me while I go for walks and manual tasks. I imagine my chosen character's interactions between characters so I can get an idea of who they are as a person, I can apply this into my design e.g. My character "Physical" has a intimidating expression on her face implying she is "dangerous", this in conjunction with crosshatching (shading with lines) on her face creates a more serious tone. This means the face is the most personality influenced part of character design because its the first thing you look at and its the easiest way for a character to tell you who they are. Other subtle details that reinforce her "dangerous" personality and add to it are the scars and bullet scars on her arm, lower breast, abs, face implying she has been in many fights, the runic tattoos imply mystery, the ronin tattoo implies she is a wanderer or nomad, The ropes in a bondage position imply a form of confidence and sensual roughness, sleeve ripped jacket implies she is a rebel, and finally her name "Physical" all of these details into one word.
With just the expression on her face and various small details you can really grasp her personality as a person.

VIBE
Now the vibe however is what design makes the audience feel about the character. The key word in that sentence is "feel" and that means emotions. I wanted the audience to feel a sense of sensual admiration alongside intimidation and respect. I do this by the positioning and the environment of my illustration e.g. we are positioned looking up at Physical, this is important because it gives us a feel of dominance because she is looking down on us. I've reinforced this by making a gradient of light from the bottom with very dark skin tones against black to the face with pale skin tones against black hair. I've made the brightest and most pure colour to be her eyes reinforcing a feeling of intimidation. I didn't create an environment with this illustration because I wanted the audience to focus on her face but if you were to create a nature vibe for example you would place your character in a forest.

AESTHETIC
Aesthetic is the artistic style of the illustration. Quite simple actually, this surprisingly is the easiest part of character design because its basically your signature art style. Actually I lied, its a little bit more than that. When I think of aesthetic I always just browse for artworks that I like through Pinterest because if you like the artwork, then its your style. I would have about ten tabs open (it gets pretty messy) of little bits I like from each artwork or even some that I won't even use for reference, I just like them. For example Physical's pose is from Ciri (from the Witcher), the hair is from a manga page (sorry I don't remember the name of it), the abs as inspired by Mikasa's (from Attack on Titan) abs. Its always important to make things consistent like the same colour for the eyes and jacket.

THEME
The theme generally revolves around the world that your character is set in. The world your character is set in is incredibly diverse so as an example for this. The world my character lives in is currently unnamed but thats irrelevant, whats relevant is the culture, communities, environment, and people Physical is related to. The jacket Physical wears is an elegant piece from a noble family she use to belong to, the ripped sleeves imply she had denounced or ran away from them, the impractical size of the jacket but she liked enough to keep implies that the noble family were people who didn't want to get their hands dirty, this also adds to her history. The runic symbols symbolise "Whisper"(pretty much magic) that is used for utility or honing survival prowess e.g. tapping symbols to release a painkiller toxin in the body, heat vision, an aura that keeps the body warm during harsh conditions. Her choker and armband possess the symbol of Ra'ah, an organisation created to get rid of certain people. The fact that the armbands and the jacket are of the same colour means they are from a similar district.

If you've gotten this far thank you for your patience, and if you skipped all the way down here thats fine I still love you. All in all Character design isn't as simple as just putting your pen to the paper and sketching out a cool looking person. A lot of thought is put into every little thing so it all fits together like a big jigsaw or well oiled gears in clockwork. There is a beauty in breathing life into a character and making them believable, it really broadens out your creativity like how would this character look if they were a young child or old and wrinkly or even people related to them.
Thanks for reading, I may not be very good at writing but I am good at character design so I look forward to talking some more!