Ryan Maloney compares character design in Procreate to tuning a guitar: tweak individual features like eye shape and mouth until they feel right together. He builds the world and branding around a placeholder character first, then works backward to refine the details.
Chapters
Getting the vibes right in your artwork or character design, it's got to be a lot like tuning a guitar. Like, you play these strings and they're just not ringing correctly, and then you tighten them up, and then together they sort of just work. So when I'm designing a character line, I'm always trying to just experiment and explore until the vibes just feel right, like they feel like they're in tune. Like, sometimes the eyes aren't right, the shape of the eyes, the the peak of the eyes isn't right, the pupils aren't right, the mouth isn't right. Sometimes it's just a different combination of things that I need to combine and experiment with until that vibe is in tune. One thing that helps me is getting the branding and the world around the characters just right. Not just right, but you get the vibes right. So you can sketch your character, use that as a placeholder, and design the branding and world around it. And then you sort of work backwards into the character design because you'll know how it should feel based on the whole brand you're setting up.
