Mastering the art of the character design sheet will level up your drawing skills. Creating a great character turnaround will benefit you in many ways, resulting in even better-drawn OCs. We’re covering the essentials of the character design sheet so you can draw your characters more consistently and maintain those essential details.
What are Character Design Sheets?
A character design sheet is a reference image that allows character designers to share design details to help themselves efficiently and others draw those characters more consistently. With any art, inconsistencies happen, but creating a character model sheet helps to make them infrequent and can serve as a guide to drawing a character in a difficult pose or angle.
CharacterHub has covered details on creating OC reference sheets, but the focus this time is specifically on the finer details of the art and how to handle certain tricky elements. However, the process begins the same way, no matter what: designing a character.
Designing a character is a process on its own; in some cases, you may still need to draw a full model sheet of them. Instead, you may have focused on a single key art that represents the core elements of the design. In many cases, these key arts tend to be the character in a representative pose, usually at a front-facing view or a ¾ view. This is a great place to start as it means you’re confident that you’ve locked in the core design elements of the character, which is probably the toughest part of the character design process. Now that you have a solid foundation it’s all refinement from there, which is the exact purpose character model sheets and turnarounds serve.
The key to making an effective turnaround, however, is understanding your character’s construction from all angles, which means you’ll have your work cut out for you.
The Character Rotation Process
It’s best to explain this process through an example, so we’re going to go ahead and take Hubert and construct a turnaround for them. Their core design has been locked down for a while since they are the face of CharacterHub after all. So, the first step is to have a character design. Your mileage may vary depending on your OC, of course.
Translating the character to three-dimensional terms requires an innate understanding of their shapes. Not just working with the essential shapes of squares, circles, and triangles, but thinking about them as objects with volume. That means considering spheres, cubes, and other shapes. With that in mind, let’s take a good look at Hubert and their basic shapes.
So, most obviously, Hubert has a big ol’ round head, so we just need to make sure we translate that into something spherical when considering them from other angles. Hubert’s body is more like a bean, which is fairly rounded. Hubert also has a little design inconsistency where sometimes they have a bit of a rump and sometimes it is a bit of a belly. Basically, Hubert’s body is a sack, and the weight shifts. We’ll need to keep that in mind as well.
A lot of these little notes I am making about the design are elements of the concept art process as I was developing my approach to drawing the character, and where I would place emphasis on their features. My Hubert tends to be a little rounder and, for lack of a better word, beanier. Other Huberts can look quite different, but there is certainly some consistency across the character, no matter what spin an artist puts on them.
Your first task, before you draw anything, is deciding how many steps are needed to make the turnaround. Depending on how you draw the character, you can do as few as 2, but in most cases, you may do 3 to 5. Ideally, you can consider each image a frame, and the more frames you have, the smoother it is to “spin” the character around, giving us that 360-degree design we often look for. In this case, I’ll be drawing a 4 figure sheet. However, if you work at ¾ angles you can get away with as few as 2.
My first step is going with a comfortable pose and angle, whatever I feel best captures the essence of the character. In this case, I am doing a ¾ angle.
To keep elements of the design consistent my next step is to draw guidelines for specific features. For example, two lines for the height of the head. I can also throw in a line for where Hubert’s bottom lands. Lastly, I’d be sure to create lines that ensure each drawing is standing on the same level. You can have as many of these guiding lines as you want. Just set them to low opacity so they don’t get in the way of clarity when sketching.
With that in mind, I am going to take the first “turn” on the character, to the front. As I do this I remember the Hubert is a sphere and a sack in my style. As long as I can keep that in mind, I can draw them at a direct frontal angle.
From here it is just the process of drawing my figures. I started with a ¾ and a frontal view. To round out this model sheet, I want a side view and a rear angle. As always, be sure the character feels consistent with your prior depictions - Hubert has to look like Hubert.
Anyway, that’s the basics of a turnaround. However, there are other elements of a character design sheet to consider.
The Character Style Sheet
Beyond the character art turnaround, character model sheets can also consist of multiple images, especially in productions like films and games. Does one set of reference drawings give you enough material to draw a complex character in a variety of situations? While possible, it would make sense to have as many drawings as possible. Great character design comes from doing a lot of drawings of the character.
You can supplement your turnaround with other types of reference images and collages for the character. These are all particularly great additions to a character profile as well.
- Expression Sheet: This type of character model sheet would consist of various expressions to show how the character’s face works in certain ways. This is especially helpful if you are handling facial features such as eyes and mouths a certain way and need to be consistent about the rules regarding those facial features.
- Key Detail Sheet: Sometimes a character design may have unique features such as scars, tattoos, or other markings that need to be drawn at multiple angles. A sheet such as this focuses entirely on those features, such as drawing a full tattoo design in addition to drawing it from a couple of angles or how the design distorts when applied to the body.
- Prop Sheet: It’s often that characters are associated with props. Consider The Doctor and his Sonic Screwdriver. Having a dedicated reference sheet for essential props for the character will save you some frustration down the line. You can simply draw the prop at a variety of angles to get a full 3D sense of the object.
- Attitude Pose Sheet: The way a character carries themselves through their body language can be an important detail to consider. For example, the way a character stands or holds their hands at rest may suggest elements of their personality. Having some rules for the character’s posing illustrated on a model sheet would be a smart move.
You don’t need to do all these to create a great character design, but they really do help, and pair well with a character turnaround model sheet.
Character Model Sheets? CharacterHub!
So you’ve got a potential bundle of model sheets? What do you do with them? Well, why not include them on your OC’s CharacterHub profile? Creating a character profile is a great way to share concepts and updates about your original character. It also allows you to maintain a running development log of how they have grown over time.
Having your model sheets available on your character profile also makes it a lot easier for people to find references to draw from if they are doing fan art or commissions based on your character. Having model sheets available also can help make it easier for artists who are offering giveaways in weekly contests on CharacterHub.
And by all means, you can always share your character model sheets and turnarounds with CharacterHub on social media. We’d love to see them!
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David Davis
David Davis is a cartoonist with around twenty years of experience in comics, including independent work and established IPs such as SpongeBob Squarepants. He also works as a college composition instructor and records weekly podcasts. Find out more about him at his website!
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