Procreate: DESIGN STYLISED CHARACTERS

Gain insights into Yavae Thomas’s creative process and discover how her shape and colour choices inform her playful character designs

- Yavae Thomas

This workshop showcases two characters who complement each other in design and stylisation, while also demonstrating contrast through the use of shapes, expression and posing. I recommend as a warm-up exercise, designing pairs of characters in the same style and same “narrative”. This helped to boost my flexibility and technical skills as both a character designer and an overall shape linguist.

Shape language is one of the main components of drafting compelling character designs for animation. It’s often the key thing to keep in mind when designing more than one character for an animated show, because having a range of silhouettes can help break the monotony of a character line-up, especially when working within a particular style.

I’ve also found that a supplemental component in designing characters is the use of colour. Colour is a valuable design tool, and it’s helpful for me as a character designer to be able to utilise colour to emphasise cohesion among my designs.

When used purposefully, shape and colour can truly make or break a design. I hope my advice can serve as a guide to help make you become a stronger character designer.

1 Loose sketching exercises