character design pondering
May. 11th, 2007 03:00 pmUgh, rainy cloudy days always make it hard for me to get started on work stuff.
So instead I'm in my LJ client, dumping some thoughts on character design and simplicity. Partially spurred by a design in the stuff I'm working on that has a bit too much detail to really tear into easily.
Simplicity of design and the number of times you anticipate drawing this design go hand in hand. Five little extra details may not seem like much for one drawing - but when you're going to draw them over and over for a comic, or worse, for animation, economy of line is essential. Each line, each detail, is another moment's thought you have to spend on every drawing.
This has shown up in my own work recently. Normally, when I draw a raccoon character, they'll be pretty complex. I might get into abstracting the edges of the markings into chaotic stylizations, there's details in the mask, there's usually three dark rings on the tail, with both ends in the midtone of the body.
But these are drawings spaced well apart. For the comic Nick and I are doing, the lead character is a raccoon. And my drawings have been getting more and more spare, as I work on the roughs, the concept doodles, the thumbnails. Most interestingly, at some point I dropped a ring from the tail. Two dark rings with a couple jags apiece turn out to be enough to carry the concept of "raccoon tail".
That one less ring is not much of a difference for any particular drawing. But multiply it by a projected size of about 120 pages, and every extra detail on the main character adds up. Save that pencil mileage for details that do something for the story: in these three pages she's in an ornate blouse, over here she's in a tough-to-draw pose, here she's aiming a scrimshawed gun at someone.
Unconsciously, I've reduced Absinthe's design down to the bare minimum that says "raccoon girl" to me. The designs of the other main characters have also been pared down: as they show up more, their details need to be more and more selective.
In his wonderful books on comics, Scott McCloud noted this reduction of detail in the main character and cited 'ease of reader identification' as the reason. "The masking effect", he dubbed it. I'm beginning to think this is a happy accident; the real reason to make secondary characters more complicated than the main character is to optimize your workload. The several hundred drawings of a title character build up in the reader's mind; that detail of their equipment you focus on in page 5 is still there by implication on page 200. The character who shows up for one page needs to say everything important about them (visually and narratively) on that one page.
What can you leave out and still tell the story of who this character is? Is your time better served by drawing bolts down every seam of that robot, or by leaving one open panel you can quickly fill in with an impression of cables and hydraulics and whatnot? Which of the details that might identify this character are fun to draw, which ones are tedious fiddly work? (contrast my recent robot spider pieces; these are chock full of detail, as they're all one-off images. Detail for its own sake is a valid direction, just not one that goes well with long-form works.)
Different media create different rules, of course. If you're designing something that'll be animated as a 3D model it's not much difference between two days or a week to model and texture it, because this has little impact on how long it takes someone to work through any particular shot. If anything, an ultra-simple model may mean more work, as what remains has to be right. If you're building stop-motion puppets, texture and surface patterns are cheap, swishy trailing bits are incredibly expensive.
It always seems to come down to 'what can you leave out?' for me. Am I lazy, or am I minimalist?
So instead I'm in my LJ client, dumping some thoughts on character design and simplicity. Partially spurred by a design in the stuff I'm working on that has a bit too much detail to really tear into easily.
Simplicity of design and the number of times you anticipate drawing this design go hand in hand. Five little extra details may not seem like much for one drawing - but when you're going to draw them over and over for a comic, or worse, for animation, economy of line is essential. Each line, each detail, is another moment's thought you have to spend on every drawing.
This has shown up in my own work recently. Normally, when I draw a raccoon character, they'll be pretty complex. I might get into abstracting the edges of the markings into chaotic stylizations, there's details in the mask, there's usually three dark rings on the tail, with both ends in the midtone of the body.
But these are drawings spaced well apart. For the comic Nick and I are doing, the lead character is a raccoon. And my drawings have been getting more and more spare, as I work on the roughs, the concept doodles, the thumbnails. Most interestingly, at some point I dropped a ring from the tail. Two dark rings with a couple jags apiece turn out to be enough to carry the concept of "raccoon tail".
That one less ring is not much of a difference for any particular drawing. But multiply it by a projected size of about 120 pages, and every extra detail on the main character adds up. Save that pencil mileage for details that do something for the story: in these three pages she's in an ornate blouse, over here she's in a tough-to-draw pose, here she's aiming a scrimshawed gun at someone.
Unconsciously, I've reduced Absinthe's design down to the bare minimum that says "raccoon girl" to me. The designs of the other main characters have also been pared down: as they show up more, their details need to be more and more selective.
In his wonderful books on comics, Scott McCloud noted this reduction of detail in the main character and cited 'ease of reader identification' as the reason. "The masking effect", he dubbed it. I'm beginning to think this is a happy accident; the real reason to make secondary characters more complicated than the main character is to optimize your workload. The several hundred drawings of a title character build up in the reader's mind; that detail of their equipment you focus on in page 5 is still there by implication on page 200. The character who shows up for one page needs to say everything important about them (visually and narratively) on that one page.
What can you leave out and still tell the story of who this character is? Is your time better served by drawing bolts down every seam of that robot, or by leaving one open panel you can quickly fill in with an impression of cables and hydraulics and whatnot? Which of the details that might identify this character are fun to draw, which ones are tedious fiddly work? (contrast my recent robot spider pieces; these are chock full of detail, as they're all one-off images. Detail for its own sake is a valid direction, just not one that goes well with long-form works.)
Different media create different rules, of course. If you're designing something that'll be animated as a 3D model it's not much difference between two days or a week to model and texture it, because this has little impact on how long it takes someone to work through any particular shot. If anything, an ultra-simple model may mean more work, as what remains has to be right. If you're building stop-motion puppets, texture and surface patterns are cheap, swishy trailing bits are incredibly expensive.
It always seems to come down to 'what can you leave out?' for me. Am I lazy, or am I minimalist?