Recently, I’ve tinkered more and more with drawing and devising characters in my sketchbook. About two winters ago, an SCBWI portfolio review that I signed up for revealed that my website was severely lacking in characters, particularly human characters. Editors and agents like to see varying facial expressions, costumes, poses, and other idiosyncrasies when looking for new artistic talent. After all, characters are the ones that make up a story. So for my recent weekly sketching, I turned to a variety of movies, tv shows, and drawings and illustrations on Pinterest and Instagram to gain some inspiration on good character design. And despite the many lovely examples set by talented illustrators and animators, I did see a pattern in the characters that were not very strong.
While art is subjective and it’s always difficult to qualify what makes something bad or good, I do think that bad character design is attributed to homogeneity. Same face syndrome, as the name suggests, is when all the people/characters an artist creates have near identical faces or body features. Unfortunately, we see this in certain animation studios, comic books, and other forms of media where characters drive the story. Consider some of the Disney princesses: while not identical to a T, many of them share very similar features including heart-shaped faces, upturned noses, full lips, starry eyes, and small hands around slim waists and slender legs. They all look clean and similar, not different enough. We even see this in real life in Hollywood and the beauty industry. Many models, actresses, and singers get lip fillers, botox, and rhinoplasty to achieve a specific standard of beauty. But that leaves very little room for uniqueness, it takes away from the variety of the human race and to me, it’s just uninteresting.
My own character design. I’m focusing my sketchbook on people.
Same face syndrome also means less diversity in character design while people look different from one another. A person of Asian descent does not look exactly the same as a person of African descent. And within those two categories are even more subcategories - what country is that person from? How is their climate? Do they exercise? Are they focused on building muscle? People have different facial features and different body types and (dis)abilities. Some people have lots of hair. Some wear glasses. Some may use a wheelchair. Some may need to avoid excess sunlight. So keeping the hugeness of our world and the many people in it in mind, why do we make our characters look so similar?
Good character design to me is about drawing different noses, eyes, legs, torsos, accessories. It’s about avoiding homogeneity and not being afraid to look imperfect, even a little grimy. When I watch animated movies, I find the clean-cut characters of Disney with their smooth skin, aligned features, perfect hair, and similar body types to be boring and not indicative of real life. The movies I gravitate toward aren’t afraid to break the boundaries of beauty standards because they really don’t matter when creating interesting characters. In fact, some of the characters I recently saw in TMNT Mutant Mayhem had wildly crooked noses, stretched torsos, and other features that didn’t perfectly match real life either due to how warped they are. But isn’t weird, imperfect, and even ugly much more interesting than flawless? I can tell you that I had a ball with that movie just because of how odd and colorful the characters looked.
So when I think of character design right, I think of variety not just in hair and skin color but in texture. I think of proportions that are considered good, okay, or even off. I picture fun costuming: oversized glasses, canes with unique handles, tiny hats. There’s no universal standard for perfect character design and some people really like the polished Disney character look. But characters that have visible differences are more interesting than characters who look the same just with a minuscule change in hairstyle or a sweater added over a shirt. People from different ethnic and geographic backgrounds, different cultures and ages, different environments and interests should not look 100% the same.
Of course in the spectrum of character design, there is realistic to cartoonish, representative to figurative. A newspaper comic will have a much different style of drawing than a Nintendo character concept designer and the idea of character design being unique to each individual creator is another conversation. But I think we as artists and illustrators looking to better our character designs can agree that characters that don’t look or feel the same are stronger. Better character design to me means starting simple with shapes: take a person with a long face for example. They may have an oval for a head with a long triangle nose while their opposite may be a small chubby-cheeked child who would look better with a button for a nose and a little circle for a head. To vary my characters, I’ll start with shapes and build onto them with more shapes, lines, and details that keep them separate and fun in their uniqueness. Because each person is special in their own way, and our characters should reflect that.