How To Make Character Concept Art: A Guide To Developing Character Designs

Why You Need Character Design Concepts

No character spontaneously emerges, fully formed, and meticulously designed. Character creation, like most things in life, is a process. Concept art character design is the process of taking a basic idea for a character and building on that idea until you have something you can work with.

Even professional character designers work on character concept designs, and why wouldn’t you do what the experts do? The role of the character concept designer is one that never leaves you once you begin, because characters, like people, can change over time.

Even Mickey Mouse’s look, as iconic as his design is, has changed over time. Characters are created to serve a need by their designer, and those needs change and can influence the changes of the character.

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That is why character design concepts are important: they are needed when you design a character. However, they are also needed as the character changes, even years down the line.

Exploring and Breaking Character Design

One of the greatest tools in learning is to fail. Every failure in design is just a moment of learning what does and does not work. No matter the impulse, trying a design concept is a huge opportunity to develop your character design.

So, when it comes to character design concepts, you can easily benefit from a “try everything” approach, such as messing with basic shapes language, color choices, or details such as hairstyles, scars, and outfit design. If a choice you made doesn’t seem to work, then you can approach it in two ways. 

First, you can see it as just a design choice that doesn’t work. That’s perfectly fair. Some design elements may not click for an OC and it is perfectly fine to move on from them. However, consider this: the design choice that failed may work if you adjust other elements of a design. Maybe that design detail doesn’t mesh with the way you have currently drawn a character, but by using concept art you can tweak the character to make the design element you’re interested in work.

Every failure is an opportunity. Remember that as you create your character design concepts.

Character Design Concept Art: Things to Explore

Understanding the fundamentals of character design is essential in the concept art process. Shapes, exaggeration, and palettes do a lot of heavy lifting in making a character design appealing. However, the character design concept process is also an opportunity to tackle other elements of the design process that will help define your characters and make the work of drawing them over and over easier over time.

So, let’s look at some things to consider as a character concept designer.

Shape

A character’s shapes go a long way to creating a visual language about who they are and their characteristics. Shapes influence how a character is read by an audience. Take, for example, a square.

Square shapes can reflect stability and strength. 

However, square shapes can also create a constrained character.

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As another example, let’s look at a circle: Round characters can be friendly-looking and cute.

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However, rounded shapes can also be otherworldly and weird.

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We’ve explored these principles in another article, but keeping them in mind during the character design concept art process goes a long way to developing your design sense.

Exaggeration

While exaggeration was already mentioned as a fundamental of character design, we need to hammer home how much it adds to a concept. Take Homer Simpson, who is an overweight, balding father figure. He is not the most interesting concept for a character on paper - there is very little in the way of the fantastic about the guy when described as a concept.

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However, the exaggeration present in The Simpsons creates a visually interesting character with loads of expression and style. Everything from the dome and cylinder shape of the head to the large, bulbous eyes, down to the pronounced shape of his gut gives Homer a cartoony appeal. If Homer’s exaggeration wasn’t as extreme as it was, would audiences have clicked with the character?

You can do this with the entire Simpson family. Marge is a great example of exaggeration, taking the “beehive” hairdo to an extreme. The exaggeration sells the character as an icon.

Posing

A great strategy when working on your character concepts is exploring posing to communicate attitude. Character designs are often “sold” to an audience at a glance and the more interesting the character is, the more likely an audience will remember them and take interest.

Dynamic posing is one of the best ways to get a character’s personality across in a single step. A great example of dynamic character posing is Sunraku from Shangri-La Frontier. Key art for the show often features Sunraku in dynamic fighting poses that highlight his speed, agility, and knife-based fighting style. 

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As you can see, Sunraku already has a striking design, as having a giant blue bird mask will create some visual interest, but the pose is what is selling him as a dynamic and action-oriented lead.

Costuming and Texture

Costuming and texture tell a story. What a character chooses to wear, the feel and look of the material, it all matters. Thinking about those details during character design concept art Is something to consider, especially once you figure out things such as posing and shape language. The way a person dresses reveals a lot about them and the same applies to characters.

Look at the history implied with the Vault Dweller of the Fallout franchise. The recent live-action adaptation is a great example of this, but this has been something that has been going on since the first games. You get the detail of the suit - bold, colorful, and contrasting with the materiality of a wasteland existence. However, that is further contrasted by details such as dirt and grime, in addition to post-apocalyptic armor scraps. 

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You get a character who seems out of time and place for their current circumstance. And all of that is just from costuming and texture. Don't neglect this in your concept art. Even a simple texture swatch to note material in a design document can mean a lot.

Consistency

Streamlining a design is something to consider, especially when you realize you will need to draw a character over and over. This is especially true when your concept art for a character design ends up potentially over-detailed, resulting in drawing them being a bit of a pain.

That is not to say details do not matter - they matter a lot. It is about balancing the essential details for moments when they matter most.  For example, just because the stitching is there doesn't mean you must draw each stitch every time.

Another reason for streamlining a design is to figure out trouble spots down the line. Figuring out how to handle drawing a character facing one direction and understanding the structure enough to draw the character’s features at different angles. Sometimes it may even result in fudging the shape details in the design to maintain consistency, though it is unrealistic. 

Take, for example, Astro-Boy. The character's iconic hair spikes are a lot like the ears of Mickey Mouse. Tezuka was very influenced by Disney cartoons, which may be an explanation for this. This means that whatever angle the character is drawn, Atom’s hair spikes maintain their relative position. It is not realistic, but it looks right for the character and we accept it as an audience.

Color Theory

Finding the right color palette is part of the character design concept process and is usually handled last when almost every other element of design is locked in. Or at least relatively locked in - designs are rarely ever “finished.”

When character concept designers try different palettes, they often do that by having a completed piece of art and trying different color combinations on it multiple times to find out what feels best. Having a good key-art image of a character that can easily be color-swapped can save you a lot of time. Sometimes color swaps can be entirely different sets of colors, or it could be as simple as changing what parts of a design are what colors from a predetermined color palette. It took me a while to find a color scheme I liked for Domingo.

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No matter the case, having a working knowledge of color theory helps a lot.

Exploring Character Concept Designs on CharacterHub

One thing that I love to do when I work on designing a new character is to find inspiration. When I browse, I am not necessarily looking for anything, but rather I want to see what things other creators try. CharacterHub has been great as a resource. The large community presents so many innovative character designs that I can’t help but be inspired. Plus, being able to share my character concepts can help me find feedback on the OCs I create.

Using CharacterHub’s tools, you can post your character concept art and get some eyes on your work, whether including them as a gallery on a character profile or using social posts and community chats to ask for feedback. Whatever your next OC project is, take advantage of CharacterHub to put them in conversation with the community.