Character Concepts - Brainstorming Activity

Written By Stephanie Broder

Today on the blog we are continuing the theme from yesterday - designing character concepts for your story project. Now, I mostly focus on comics and graphic novels but I daresay the same tools and techniques can apply to things like animation and video games, too!

If you haven’t read it yet, yesterday’s post on what we can learn about character concept art from the pros might be a good place to start! And then I encourage you to give this exercise a try.

Brainstorming Activity - Change One Thing

This is an activity I like to do with my classes because it forces my students to get out of their comfort zone with their designs and iterate through a few ideas before settling on the final design.

You can do this exercise with a full-body design, but for the example below I’m just going to work with a head to keep things simple!

Start with your “base” design, i.e. the first thing you created when coming up with the character. Here’s mine:

A simple, black-and-white character portrait

Now, for the next drawing you are going to re-create the character exactly except you will change one feature.

If you’re working with a full body, there’s SO MANY things you can change (including costume!)

But for a face, consider: face shape, hair, eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth, ears, freckles, scars, etc.

Version 2: The eyes have been changed

Next, using the second design, proceed to change another feature. You can change the same feature (for me, eyes again) BUT I’d recommend changing a few different ones before you circle back to ones you’ve done before.

Version 3: Changed the mouth from lips to gap-toothed smile

Next… well, you get it! Each time you redraw the character, change one thing. Keep at it for as long as you want, changing as many features as you want! I bet as you change things, the next change will start to suggest itself to you. For example, my character started to get more pointy overall as I carried on.

This exercise forces you out of your comfort zone, especially if you keep at it for a while. If you have to change the eyes five times, you better have five different eye shapes on hand!

Stephanie Broder
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Designing Characters - Three Examples from the Pros