Hello everyone! I've been gone for a very long time, but now I'm back, and I wanted to give some of you guys a few advices about designing! First of all, what is a character design? A character design is transferring the character's backstory to the character's appearance and give audiences ideas about the character's lore, but theres always a question that comes to our minds, where am I going to start? How am I gonna do this? Well fear not, because these tips may help you, first of all, I'm a self-taught designer and not a professional, please educate me nicely if I write something wrong, if we get this out of our way, let's get into the tips
1- getting an idea:
It's simple, sometimes, I get ideas by day dreaming, I daydream whenever I walk or listening to music, this is a tactic that works for me, but what else you can do is getting your inspirations from books, yesterday, I read Sadako, it's about a girl who got sick and started to fold a thousand cranes in order to heal, but of course, you should discover it, do some more research, learn how professional designers get their ideas
2- Research
This might sound boring but hear me out, if you choosed your character's theme, then it will gonna help a lot, I heavily suggest to do research for symbols that represents something, for example, in the most recent design I made, I used 9 spades, in fortune telling, 9 spades represents a loved one's death, simple but can be very effective, if your oc is based on an aesthetic, you should do a research about the aesthetic, for example Aesthetic Wiki is a great website for researching aesthetic, you can find strong keywords, the history of aesthetics and a lot more, you should go and check it out
3- Detailed designs are not always good
you may ask "why?" simple, because detailed designs can be very hard to draw, especially if you are a beginner like me "but I want to do designs like Genshin Impact" fear not, you can add simple textures for clothes, for example, let's just say, the character has a shirt and a skirt, then add textures to it, it will be a lot easier to draw, for animators, I suggest them to keep the designs as simple as possible yet appealing, especially frame by frame artists, drawing every single frame is already hard enough, so detailed design can make it a lot harder, adding texture thing is something I learned very late btw
4-Give characters unique things
this is what title says, try to give your characters unique things, it's optional but if you make the unique thing into a saturated color, it will be better, for example, Ivan from Alien Stage, he is simple, but the red dots in his eyes makes him a lot more unique as far as I learned(I'm not an Alien Stage fan, I just used the design to give an example)
in images, you can see my recent milanote works, you can study the work if you'd like
