A new character for a comic book requires some work and dedication on your part as a designer. And it all starts with a character design concept you later develop into a full-fledged fictional person.
Once you already have a theme and a story, you can start working on a character. As soon as your flesh out your whole fictional universe, you’re ready to sketch your pages, too. An easy-to-follow guide on how to make a comic book can be helpful if you’re new to this world.
Passion and creativity are the first things you need when designing a character. We’ve prepared a list of six factors you should look over when creating compelling comic book characters. Without further ado, let’s check them out.
Table of Contents
How to start designing your comic book character
You are going to start with a character design concept. It’s the first step in the character design concept. Concept art is described by drafting ideas of a fictional world populated with unique characters and scenery. It’s a way for the animator to show different creative designs to an art director before settling for a final design.
When creating a character for a fictional world, artists start with a concept design to explore that character’s personality and backstory through visual cues. When applying your knowledge and talent, the character sketch should result in a memorable character that brings something positive to your story.
As a designer, you must understand your character and their story before bringing them to life. Before creating a character, do your research and send your animator feedback.
Start with studying the real world. Learn how people and animals react, move and display emotions. It will help you create believable and realistic characters.
Then, examine your favorite works of art to determine what makes them appealing. You can start working on your own as soon as you understand how your favorite character works from a design perspective.
Throughout the design process, be sure to ask for constant feedback. And make sure your character fits your script.
1. Know your demographics
Before drawing your characters for a project, think about the target audience. Who you’re targeting your comic book to could influence the simplicity or complexity of your design. You’ll notice that children’s books use more color and simple shapes. Characters made for an older demographic are more detailed and graphic.
2. Build your comic book world
Build your entire universe, not just your character. Think about the type of world where your character lives to pinpoint how they look and what they wear.
Let’s take a science fiction world with interplanetary travel and technological developments. In such a setting, the characters look more edgy and robotic or metallic than those set in the past, in a rural area, for example.
Think about how surroundings change your character’s looks and perceptions. Later, implement these things in your sketches.
3. Establish character foundations
Proportions, pose, and placement are fundamental principles of design. Use them to give your character the best chance of success. Practice with poses and shapes to find some good starting points and go from there.
One of the essentials of character design is using basic shapes to sketch your character. The body shape can say things about them. Simple, rounder designs are perceived as cute, while angular ones are more menacing.
Shape your character from multiple points of view to understand how they work, move, and look from certain angles. You will learn to draw them in action on your comic book pages later.
4. Sketch the character
Once you’ve determined the basic shapes of your character foundations, you can sketch their anatomy. The next step will be to pencil out design drafts on top of your initial sketches. You will soon see how your character is starting to come alive.
Exercise your creativity and vision to come up with a character design that captivates your demographics. It must be memorable and unique to maintain your audience’s attention throughout the story.
Continue to pose your character from multiple points of view to know exactly how they will look from any position and angle.
5. Start inking your sketch
After you already have a few drafts of your character’s various poses, it’s time to give them attitude. Cement their design in ink by doing the line art. First, you outline the primary contours that define the character, remembering to use line weight variation for dynamism.
Next, you add shadows to emulate lighting and create a contrast between the worn materials. This is where you work with light and dark values to increase page readability and character impact.
Then you add hatches to explain the design elements’ materials, forms, and textures. That adds more definition to your sketch. At the end of your inking process, you should have a clear and concise line art representation of your original character design.
6. Choose your main colors
The final step is to give your character design colors. And that’s the best part because you can use colors to reflect character personality traits, hopes, dreams, and even backstory elements. For example, an optimistic character will typically use a brighter, more colorful palette than one characterized by cynicism. Of course, you can express character traits through poses, too.
Compose an attractive color scheme for your character design. Use color theory and psychology throughout your creative process. Add realistic lighting and shading, and blend and adjust layers to build a vivid representation of your ideal character design.
Remember to keep things simple and have your demographics in mind throughout the process. Audiences understand well-built characters from the first moments they see them. Simplicity is excellent when designing comic books and animation because both mediums use many poses and renderings. Moreover, straightforward character designs save money and production time.
Conclusion
Starting with an idea and some research, you can create wonderfully memorable characters for comic books. It all starts with a concept where you put in your work and creativity, and with some well-meaning collaboration, you can turn it into a lovely comic book. Now that you’re armed with some essential knowledge don’t waste time and start creating your fictional world and its inhabitants!
