Character Study, Design, and Thumbnails
I’ve wanted to write this blog post for a while now. However, I’ve been working on other components of the project, such as the comic script and the thumbnails. I haven’t been too focused on character design. But it’s constantly on my mind, and I can at least go through my process of adapting a character and character design in general. We’ll also talk about thumbnails because that’s been my main focus as of late. Enjoy!
I love drawing characters, humans especially. I don’t draw animals often, and I rarely draw robots. FNAF characters are predominantly anthropomorphic robots, and they have a specific feel to them. They're from a horror game, so their support to be unsettling. I rarely draw horror, so mix that in with robots and animals you get new territory to tread. They are also existing characters, so I’m not making anything up. I want to keep it true to the original while also sticking to my art style.
I decided to go back to my roots for this project. How did I get better at drawing? By drawing a butt-ton of test sketches before going in for real. The only way to get better at something is to do it regularly. And thus I began to play around. I wanted the character to emote while also being aware that I’m drawing a robot. So the expressions will be limited. Furthermore, in the show I’m adapting, only one of the robots can blink—the rest can’t. And that’s only true to the Role-play, not the original game. I’m still not used to the character but I’m on the right track to getting the change of drawing FNAF characters.
When drawing characters, you need to keep a few things in mind:
Silhouette: When designing a character, it’s important to think about how easily a character can be recognized. Near or far, if you can tell two characters apart by just their shadows or silhouettes alone, you’ve done a good job. A good example of this Micky Mouse. This character on the right has an interesting side silhouette because of his open faceplate.
Color Scheme: You also want characters to differ in color variants as well. It’s best to keep color schemes simple and to follow a specific color pallet. Colors can have various meanings and can define a character, red can emphasize anger, fire, or heroics. Color Theory also plays a vital role in color scheming, you don’t want to just throw random colors together. If you change the colors to grayscale via a filter, and you can still understand the image, you’ve done a good job (I learned this tip a few days ago, but I can’t find the source).
Place of Rest and Face: When coloring in a character, it’s important to think about where you want your viewer’s eyes to rest. Using a dark color helps, but you need to think about where. When looking at a character your eyes move around the image, but the focal point should either be the chest up, mostly the face.
Detail: You don’t want characters to be heavily detailed, you don’t want an image to be too busy and lose focus from the face. Heavily detailed characters can work, but know that you don’t have to go all out on it.
Make Sure You Can Draw Them Again: When working in animation or comics, you want to make sure that your characters are relatively easy to draw, not too much detail helps, keep them simple and identifiable.
Personality: While designing a character, it’s important to think of their personality. What do they like? What do they hate? How would they act if they were put in a certain situation? How can you portray the personality of a character without dialogue? What do their clothes, hair, and color palette say about this character? It helps in making the character identifiable.
I didn’t design these characters, but I still needed to draw them. When adapting, I needed to figure out what details I needed and which ones I didn’t. I didn’t count every single strand of hair drawn on a specific character, not entirely. I did that for the bangs, but I left the rest to interpretation. So when adapting these ideas for character design still apply.
Thumbnails are the storyboarding version of comics. They are basically rough drafts. They help to layout a page for both panels, speech-bubbles, sense of tone, action, etc. If your struggling with a page, just get some scrap paper and make a panel, and split it in two. Each side of the divided panel acts as a separate page in an open book. It helps you understand the flow of your story, look, and tone without too much detail. It’ll serve as your blueprint so you aren’t going in blind.
Writing a script can help you understand the story before you even draw it. The script gives you a sense of how many speech-bubbles, panels, and actions you’ll need to draw. The script I’ve been writing has been very helpful to me when creating my thumbnails. However, the script and thumbnails don’t need to be copied to a T, you will make changes as you go. Not everything in the script will go on paper, and the format of the thumbnails may change while drawing. And that’s completely fine. It’s part of the art process.
-Bellapinkpen
