Character Description

Before you start drawing or imagining what clothes a character will wear, how big its eyes will be, or what color to make its hair, you need to have at least a basic idea of who your character is. The design will ultimately represent the character’s personality, so understanding how that character thinks and acts will help you represent it. For example, it’s easier to know the type of clothes the character will wear if you know its profession; if it’s a knight or a soldier, it will wear armor or battle gear, but if it’s an accountant, wearing armor or carrying a weapon would make no sense at all, no matter how cool it looks!

Also, the attitude of a character can define its looks: a very dynamic character would be fast moving, while a sad character would probably tend to slouch and move very slowly. A happy character could have a big smile and large, expressive eyes, while a depressed character might have small, tearful eyes and a mouth that frowns.

Basically, developing a good description of your character will definitely help you understand how it would behave; as a result, you can get into its head and imagine what it would wear and how it would walk, talk, smile, laugh, and cry. Different people can react in completely different ways to the same situation and this also applies to the characters you create.

You don’t need to develop the character’s complete history or personality if you don’t want to go that far. A simple description of its personality and how it looks would be enough. So let’s take a look at a brief description of the character you’ll build in this book. Let’s call the character Jim. From now on, you need to have a personal relationship with Jim to be able to understand how he thinks and acts. Consider Jim a living being and not just a thing.