10 Iconic Character Designs and the Concept Art Behind Them

Table Of Content

• Legend of King Arthur Challenge: Character Design Winners Interview
• Finalize the pose and fine details
• Step 4: Start with thumbnails (a lot of them)
• Awesome Resources
• UNREAL LIVE LINK 1.1 – SEAMLESS ICLONE & UNREAL ANIMATE-TO-RENDER WORKFLOW
• Cyberpunk Sam – From Sketch to Final
• Design your own characters from scratch with these resources

Some art styles, such as watercolor, can be mimicked on the computer but usually come out best in their original medium. Personal preference, of course, depends on your own experience creating artwork. There’s an argument to be made that the tools you use don’t necessarily matter. In theory, you can design a character as effectively with pen and paper as on the computer, and likewise top tier software won’t cover up poor concepts or lacking art fundamentals. The character concept is a lot like the destination your ship is steering towards, and for that reason, you should pay particular attention to this step. Unfortunately, there’s not always a straightforward way to know whether you’ve chosen the right destination.

Legend of King Arthur Challenge: Character Design Winners Interview

Get free tutorials, tips, motivational articles, news and resources delivered to your inbox. Whether it’s for work, your next personal project or a fun concept for your next tabletop RPG character, you’ll find these tutorials will come in handy. The following list is an additional directory of articles, blogs, podcasts, and other useful resources for artists, which you can use as a compendium for our visual library. The original document was resourced and meticulously compiled by Ashley Odell ( @ashleyodellart on Twitter ). Many have requested us to include some of these notes directly here, and we have expanded the original list with links for new content.

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Finalize the pose and fine details

When you are ready to get back to work, find the thumbnail that evokes your concept most effectively. You are then going to create a larger, more detailed sketch that will serve as the basis for your final artwork. The design has to evoke who the character is and that means the designer must be skilled at using nonverbal, visual elements such as expression, gesture, color and clothing to communicate personality traits. This is especially true for simplistic character styles, where the designer has to communicate more with less.

Step 4: Start with thumbnails (a lot of them)

These features offer a new avenue for animators looking to integrate iClone and Unreal in practical and intuitive ways. Frame-drops were a common downside of Live Link being heavily dependent on hardware performance — especially prevalent while live recording heavy data streams. Live Link 1.1 addresses these hiccups with the advent of timecode-based recording which transmits and records full-frame data, even on substandard system specifications. Reallusion is excited to announce big updates on both Character Creator 4.1 (CC4.1) and iClone 8.1. With the latest improvements, CC becomes a highly scalable solution with the ability to auto-rig any humanoid model. Meanwhile, enhancements to bidirectional data linking and timecode-synced recording makes iClone and Unreal a powerful duo in a demanding production environment.

Awesome Resources

Han Solo and Chewbacca, on the other hand, originally had a retro look more reminiscent of Flash Gordon as you can see pictured below. Still, even from a pencil sketch you can imagine the personalities of these characters, which remain consistent. Of course, before you send your presentation off to your client, it’s a good idea to take a step back and evaluate honestly how you yourself respond to the finished character.

UNREAL LIVE LINK 1.1 – SEAMLESS ICLONE & UNREAL ANIMATE-TO-RENDER WORKFLOW

Well, technically Galactus lives in outer space, but for everybody else, it is important to create a sense of environment for an effective presentation. Working non-destructively in a separate color layer will also allow you to experiment. When you’re ready to paint in your colors, use a blend mode such as “Color” in Photoshop in order to tint your value tones with the appropriate color.

Be sure to check out our roundup of ArtStation Blogs posts for character artists. As well, you can visit the character section of ArtStation Learning to find free training videos. To embark upon the path of artistic excellence, we should always remind ourselves of the importance of robust artistic training, which begins with a firm grounding in the art fundamentals. We recommend you immerse yourself in the elements of art and acquaint yourself intimately with the interplay of color, shape, line, texture, and form, possibly under the guidance of a professional mentor. By doing so, you will allow the principles of design to shape your artistic sensibilities.

Finally, you should base your decision on the image file type the client wants. These days, most clients will be expecting some sort of digital file for easy storage and sharing, usually an original source file from a program like Photoshop and a simple image type such as JPEG. Get the concept as fleshed out as you can, and come back to this step later if necessary.

If you are designing a character for an animator, you will also need to create a handful of orthographic T-pose sketches. These display a front, back, and side view of the character standing with their legs together and arms outstretched, and they give the animator a neutral view of the design on which to animate. T-poses can also be useful for figuring out clothing detail that may get lost in a more expressive pose.

There are a number of brainstorming techniques that can help you develop your character profile. The reason being that singular words keep ideas simple, distilling them to their essence, and this comes in handy when you need to communicate those traits visually. This article is part of a series by Virtuos aimed at sharing best practices in game development and art production.

When something in your design just doesn’t feel right, the underlying concept is usually the first place you should look. CC4.1 further advances its universal character creation system with the added ability to subdivide and export any animated character while giving high-resolution output for close-up shots. ArtStation Plus and Pro users can take advantage of this blogging system that comes with a powerful editor.

Below is a design for Ahri, the nine-tailed fox character, showing clothing details that would help animators decide how her clothes move. From their species to their clothing, everything about a memorable character is carefully designed (usually over many iterations) by concept artists and art teams. If you are working on a team or with a client, this can be a good time to gather feedback before going any further—in which case, you may want to provide a few (no more than three) options.

You can also gather reference images for anything you’re unsure about—from the character concept as a whole to specific details like clothing, hairstyle, facial expression, poses and more. The important thing is that each of these images help you visualize your concept. It is important to understand that using reference images for inspiration is not cheating (provided, of course, you are not creating exact copies). Whether you like it or not, your art is subconsciously influenced by what you’ve seen, including other artists that have inspired you, and collating references is how you consciously control that influence.

Creating art is a process of blind feeling, aesthetic judgement and trial-and-error. The client should have provided you with information about the context for the character, the target audience, and the preferred style. Every day talented artists are connecting with other community members through their posts on ArtStation Blogs. We’ve gathered a few such posts where artists are offering a sneak peek into their unique character design workflows.

The tutorial covers character portrait rendering using 3D Base Mesh + Photoshop paint-over. In this tweet, comic artist and concept designer Andy Park revealed his design for the Scarlet Witch’s suit in the finale of WandaVision on Disney+. To block in value, you’ll want to choose contrasting shades of grey for shadows, mid-tones, and highlights. Working in a separate layer beneath your sketch, color over your character with the mid-tone. Value is an art term that refers to light and shadow, and as this can be a challenge in and of itself, it is best to separate value from color.