PAINT LORE-DRIVEN CHARACTER ART

Lucas Lacerda creates unique characters with depth, using lore and a world-building approach to guide his design choices

- Lucas Lacerda

Creating characters is about much more than making cool or beautiful art.

At its core, any design is a problem-solving process, one that balances form and function. As artists, we often lean into one or the other, but great design usually balances these factors. So, how can we find that balance?

While inspiration can come from emotions, objects or personal experiences, one of the most powerful tools for grounding your designs is lore. A character's backstory and their world don't just add depth – they provide boundaries, focus, and purpose. All the information found on a character's lore is full of clues that can guide our creative decisions. Who is this character? What's their role in their world? What's their mindset, social status or relationships? Questions like these reveal practical and visual cues, from clothing and gear to posture and silhouette.

Rather than seeing lore as a constraint, we'll see it as a compass. It narrows our choices, but in the best way possible, giving us direction and purpose.

In this workshop, I'll walk you through how to use a character's backstory and world as a foundation for design, revealing how every step of the creative process - from posing and costuming to lighting and rendering - is intertwined with a character's lore. We'll use storytelling to create characters who feel real.

1 Choose key storytelling elements