Designing a Character

From Sketch to Portfolio Piece

Hi everyone!

I’m currently taking a class about illustrating children’s books, and our first assignment was to design a character. I’m curious how our processes are the same and different, so I’ll be sharing my process for the character design process. How can we learning from each other? Let me know in the comments how you think about drawing characters for kids books!

Here’s how I tackle character design in 4 steps…

1) Sketching body shapes: What makes a cute character but is also easy to draw 20+ times?

The first step was to test out some different shapes for a red panda character named Red. I find it’s important to be loose and carefree in this step. Just drawing and doodling without worrying too much about the final result is helpful for finding different shapes and coming up with ideas. I filled a couple pages with lots of loose and messy sketches, and then I narrowed it down to these top 5 choices:

I thought about the story and actions my charactered needed to do. I also thought about a design that wouldn’t be too complicated to draw over and over. I decided he should probably should be on two feet and that he would wear clothing, because I don’t have too many anthropomorphic animals in my portfolio. My portfolio already has lots of characters with the proportions of 5, so ultimately I opted for character 4 to add some variety to my portfolio! Which do you like the best?

2) Color tests: What makes the character pop?

The second step was to determine color. I drew this guy in a black and white sketch and filled him with various colors. I have a folder of color palettes saved, so I referenced those for color selections. I did twelve color tests, and honestly that was way too many! I do not recommend doing that many, so I’ve shared jut six of them with you here:

Color tests for my character

If you scroll down, can you tell which one I went with?

I really loved the one with the purple trousers, but I thought I’d try something a bit brighter. I don’t often use bright lemon yellow or a super saturated orange. I figured class is a good time to experiment, so that’s the one I went with! Which would you choose? (And the beauty of my hybrid process is that I can change paint colors after scanning them into photoshop, so I can try these other variations after the course!)

Also I liked the green pants, but I know this character lives in a jungle and will have a lot of green in the background. A green outfit might make it tricky for him to stand out from the background, so that outfit was out. These are all important things to think about when deciding on a character’s color palette.

3) Medium test: Do I like this character painted?

Before committing to paint the final character page in gouache, I wanted to first test the medium and see if I liked how it would look. I did these quick sketches and liked how the paint and colored pencil gave a bit of fur texture, so I decided to work in gouache for this one.

4) Final character: Putting it all together!

Finally it was time to paint my character! Here’s a 13 second video showing the process of adding gouache and then colored pencil:

Here’s the painting after being scanned, but before any digital edits:

And lastly, below is the finished piece with some digital edits! It’s so fun to draw on top of your own drawing— I love this step!

Bonus: Page of emotions… with a slight change

You can see that I moved back to a more muted orange for the fur. Sometimes you just can’t change your habits, and I really enjoy softer colors :)

What parts of our process for character design are the same? What’s different? I’d love to learn from you about how you approach creating characters for kids books, so let me know in the comments.

See you next week to talk more about kids books!

Katie

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