Character Design Features – In this tutorial, I’ll share with you the process of designing and drawing a fantasy character by combining the characteristics and appeal of humans and animals/subraces. Before showing you a project, I want to focus on a series of animal features including ears, horns, feet, and claws. Finally, I will design and illustrate a fictional character as an example.
Regardless, replacing human ears with existing mammalian ears dilutes the appearance of the race and invites descriptions of gentle, fairy-like, earthly creatures (domestic ears) or uncontrollable and ferocious (wild ears). Here are some examples of ear and shape language to consider when designing a character.
Character Design Features
In real life, fox ears look a bit like cat ears, but I like to draw the fox ears longer/longer to mimic the ears of a fennec fox. Below are the bunny ears, a design that usually indicates a small, docile or innocent personality.
Information Sheet 1
To be honest, I don’t draw bear ears at all, but you might be interested because they’re cute too.
Make sure the ears actually look like they’re attached to the head, especially from a bird’s-eye view. The photo below is a bit exaggerated, but in reality, cat ears are located on the back of the head. Additionally, if the head is tilted, the ears will not be aligned horizontally and one ear will be lower than the other. Try using horizontal lines that cross over the head to make sure the ear placement isn’t inaccurate.
Dragon, demon, and goblin horns are also ears to consider. After watching the anime “The Virgin Soul of Bahamut in the New Age”, I can definitely conclude that half-demon rocks! I highly recommend watching this to learn about demi-angels, demi-demons, and drakes.
For a half-demon character, when facing a 45 degree angle, it would look like this. The shortening means that the further the horn faces us, the less sideways we can see, so it looks less wide. The opposite also applies. The further away the horn is from us, the wider it appears. It’s best to use real-life examples to further your learning!
Robot Character Set Design Vector Download
From here, try drawing corners of different shapes, angles, sizes, lengths, etc. Depending on the look and practicality you want for your character/creature, sharp, jagged, coiled, double, triangular, and graded corners may work best for your design. For the drawing below, I used the preset G Pen.
To paint the corners, I used the preset oil brushes (for solid colors and light blending) and the preset opaque watercolor brushes (for heavy blending). Experiment with a variety of colors and palettes compared to plain gray or red devil’s horns. Here are some simple examples that came to mind, and I recommend browsing the web for other coloring ideas.
The last little tip for the ears! If you’re designing your own mythical or semi-human race, definitely don’t go back and incorporate everything you can think of. Here are some other ears I quickly brainstormed from existing animals that don’t fall into the category of soft furry ears or devil ears.
As with the furry ears, remember that the horns are symmetrical and parallel horizontally on the head.
6480 Drawings — Making This Guide Because I See This Question Time…
3. Inspired by insects (I’m personally not interested in insect based features but it’s simple so I included it XD)
The paw of a leopard/lion/leopard/leopard/leopard half-paw is very small compared to the full paw, but can be further reduced to mimic a demi-human appearance. Considering the human hand, adding padding and thickness to a normal human hand can really bring out the half-tiger feel, as shown below. Adding scales and extending the hands can help depict the dragon’s claws. Although rabbit feet also have four phalanges/toes, just like humans and tigers, I like to simplify them to three digits to emphasize the nature and innocence of the domestic rabbit.
However, bird claws are a little different. Birds have three phalanges/fingers and a thumb that is in the opposite direction of the three phalanges to help the bird grasp branches and catch prey.
Below, I used a soft airbrush to create an overall gradient from light to dark, and used a preset oil brush to apply the base color and shadow shape.
Fundamentals Of Character Design
Of course, there are still many things we can change, such as the tail, headgear such as helmets, skin textures such as scales, etc. I recommend browsing online for more design ideas and inspiration!
Depending on the aura of the race, such as cute, petite, majestic (like a fairy or wood elf), savage, evil, pathetic (a demon or goblin) or other, you will have different characteristics and even gestures to consider. I tend not to consider practicality and realism, but if you’re designing a race that’s involved in the story, you might want to consider the scavenging method the creature follows and choose its limb type accordingly. Also consider formal language. Smooth, rounded shapes tend to contrast with sharp, jagged, and angular shapes.
Now I will create a fictional character design as a demonstration. Today I wanted to draw some character designs that mimic the description of “majestic and pure” and maybe mention “demon” or something similar.
First, I like to draw 3-5 designs and use rough colors. I like doing it in a “chibi” style because the focus of brainstorming and narrowing down is not the details. For drawing I use dae pen4 which can be downloaded for free here. For rough shading, I used the default “Dark Watercolor” brush and painted on a layer below the line art layer.
Character Design Session One — Sarah Davis
I’ll illustrate the second design because I think it represents my previous description so well that I can imagine it being illustrated. I recommend drawing front, side, and back views to help illustrate yourself and others, but I won’t do that here because the illustration I want to do will be a headshot, so it doesn’t matter in this case. Now that we have the design complete, it’s time to flesh it out.
First I usually quickly draw a pose/gesture. Since I was painting a head portrait this time, I quickly used the Loomis head method to create a slightly higher angle (looking down) of the head.
Now let’s draw the line art or the actual drawing. I’m using the Day Pen 4 again. Some artists make another sketch after completing the first one, but in this case, since my style is very rushed and rough, I sketch roughly. You are too detailed and if you are going to draw something other than what I am going to do, your drawing should not be detail oriented.
Now I’ll group the basic colors for hair, clothes, skin, face, and horns. I will stick to the original colors used in the design. I used the preset “Oil Paint” brush for this because it’s very consistent with the opacity.
The Quick Guide To Character Face Design By Fionacreates On Deviantart
Now, using a soft airbrush, I lighten the drawing, making the inner lines lighter and the outer lines darker. To ensure that I can easily change the line color without erasing anything, I use Lock Transparent Pixels on the drawing layer.
For the lines around the clothes, I chose blue because it’s a slightly different color than the base purple color, and for the skin lines, I chose brown.
To paint shadows and midtones (values between light and shadow values), I used the preset “Dense Watercolor” brush to sweep over simplified shadow shapes, with the light coming from above. If the light source is warm, make sure the shadow color is cooler, which is what I did here. I used gray to pull the hair strands back/farthest away from us to show that they are far away. In real life, distant objects appear less saturated, also known as atmospheric perspective.
From here, I enhance the shadows by adding light reflected in them. This is shown by the “grey” color in the shadows. I also added saturated strokes between the shadows and highlights to simulate the effect of subsurface scattering. Many artists do this and it makes the area come alive. This is all done using thick watercolor brushes.
How To Design Comic Characters
In the end, I erased almost all of the painting. I merged all the layers, including the color layer and the drawing layer, locked the transparent pixels again, then used a soft brush in overlay mode to glaze the top of the character, using a light yellow/beige color to add more warm highlights to the top of the character . Notice that the entire illustration is blue-orange, a color combination that naturally works well since they are complementary colors. I also abused the “adjacent colors” approach of blue and purple.
Thank you so much for reading so far! We hope you found this tutorial useful for drawing animals and fantasy features, the drawing process,
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