Character Development & Design.

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 It’s hilarious honestly, I swear trying to go in one direction you find out you need to know another thing, another thing, oh and look ANOTHER thing. Maybe I am on Edge because last month or so what I thought was a small visit with the family has grown into a longer stay, and what our family thought was 100% remote work has turned into limited states, as well as office visits. Luckily our son’s main hub for his homeschooling is here so maybe getting him a more stable social life is the blessing I should be focusing on.

    (Wow that was a rant, and I apologize.)


Come to realize your story can be interesting and hit all the beats to make an awesome pitch, but when it comes down to, in those in-between key scenes is a whole lot of meat missing, specifically the character's table and worth value in character development. When running my tabletop campaigns, the characters had pre-established development but it was my job to introduce challenges to further that development even if I don’t control the end outcome of the character’s evolution. The NPC’s I would give personality, and points of a plot to be branched off of, but was still completely reactionary causing their character development to be dependent on players' actions. I need a more structured way of making my character feel real and relatable without completely breaking their initial persona.


    To do this I began to study character design to not just build the development of characters in my storyboard exercises but to build upon what I learned and continue to learn on figure drawing. Adding clothing to nudes is probably a good idea as I don’t want to come across as a perv with tons of NSFW, but also don’t want to tell my son he can’t look at what I'm drawing anymore.


    So this shout-out goes to the awesome mentors and instructors to guide me through character design. Marc Brunet, Mary Jane Begins, & KNight Zhang. Knight Zhang has several great tips and courses to offer. She guides you from the beginnings of basic character silhouettes and its many thumbnailing and ideation uses for exercises. To fully fleshed out Pitch Decks to give clients and future employers. Her views on color harmony and portfolio construction are in my opinion near essential if you want to pursue a character design career.


    Marc Brunet, one of the main master mentors I follow for the learning process hacks and understanding, is mainly involved in character design/ illustration. He had a simple “leveling system” approach to learning which breaks down what to study first to essentially level up your art skills. Though I am currently a traditional artist I find everything he teaches helpful.


MaryJane offers a LinkedIn course on character development & Design. Covering a pretty in-depth view of her process. Creating sidekicks and villains and adding story to the character through design. She even covers some overlap topics in animation, expressions, color, turnaround, and personality archetypes.


    The top Takeaways I learned during these studies is applying storying frameworks to characters already in a story circle and adding depth to a character's development. The design comes from the story, not the other way around. Character Designers are another Separate career working on a special niche of an over-bigger pipeline and workflow. Some make great commission work when as talented and presentable as knight zhang.

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