First of all, happy new year to you all! ✨
I wish you all the best, may 2024 be a year of creativity !
Character design is a thing that always fascinates me - but also a thing that I'm not so good at. Some people have a natural knack for it, and some people do not. For me, designing backgrounds is easy compared to designing characters.
But one thing I do know is that in any discipline, it is good to watch how the masters do this or that.
So I started a sort of habit (a sort, because I don't want to put too much pressure on myself with New Year's resolutions 😂) of making a drawing sheet almost every day of character designs made by masters such as Disney animators, to understand the mechanism and the way of making good and dynamic character designs.
And you should think that it's just copying and that it's not useful to improve, but it's not true. In fact, unless you do it mechanically, without thinking, observing the way it is made and trying to find a method (like starting from rounds and simple shapes...) to redraw it, to get a grip on it, is a very good method.
At least it worked for me, because I noticed a difference between the first and the last drawings.
I noticed some patterns in the creation of the characters, recurring shapes, how the dynamics work...
On the following sheet, I made a fat version of the wolf character; the left one is the original and the right one is the fat personalised one. It is also a nice exercise to not only copy, but also to make a variant that will make you prove that you understand what you are drawing and what characteristics create the character.
I hope you like it and that it inspires you to practice, I will come back with more series like this because I think I am on a roll! 😄
See you soon for more creations.
This sketch are really mind blowing.
The imagination of each character is worth studying.
Thank you, clearly you're right 🙏
Those are beautiful sketches! Those are some confident lines you have.
A lot of people when they hear that you are an artist, they think you can do EVERYTHING. I had to explain to them why I, as a fine artist, can't do character design simply because it's not my field. They be like "but you can draw". They think it's so easy to do all these stuff and even though they are kinda related, they aren't exactly the same lol. It takes a lot of years of training to do them and do them effectively. It's not as simple as drawing a cartoon animal.
Thank you.
You're right, and I think it's pretty much the same in every field; when people don't know a discipline at all, they minimise it, it's a kind of ultra-crepidarianism. It would be like asking a maths teacher to teach languagues just because he's a teacher, after all, lol.