Ryan Maloney draws a character called Rocket Boy and shares three tips for adding personality: start with a blank page and let the shape emerge, draw from the inside out by embodying the character's attitude, and master tiny details like mouth creases and eyebrows to create a unique style.
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In this video, you'll learn how to add more personality to your drawings. I'll be drawing this character I'm calling Rocket Boy. Let's start sketching. For this drawing, I'm using Paper Mate pencils, Prismacolor markers, and a Posca pen for lining. And I'm drawing everything on a roll of paper, starting off with a blank sheet. This drawing started off as a practice, a challenge to myself to create something from a blank sheet of paper. Here's tip number 1 for adding more personality to your characters. Let's start with a blank sheet of paper. Don't try to control the idea too much and just start drawing. Shape your character as you go and explore new and different ways to draw body parts, mannerisms, and characters with attitude. Speaking of attitude, that's tip number 2: draw a character from the inside out. Now that sounds strange, but when you're drawing, you can act out your character's personality, add your own attitude, and make it different. Make your attitude come out in the lines, in the facial features, in the expression of the characters. Doing this will make your character stand out from others you see, and it'll be be totally original, and originality and personality go hand in hand. Tip number 3: the details. Practice tiny elements of your characters over and over. Mouth creases, eyebrows, pupils, noses, gum lines. Combine these elements into different characters and see what you create. Can you draw a nose 50 different ways? Can you draw a nose totally different from any other way you've ever seen before? Can you copy the way someone drew a nose and the way someone drew a mouth and make a totally different style combination out of those two? There's endless ways to combine and experiment with the elements of a character design. Don't forget, while you're exploring styles and shaping your drawing to have more personality, always study the basics of drawing structure. There are tons of great tutorials on YouTube teaching you the structure of heads or bodies, formulas that you can borrow and draw on top of. If you're just as good at the fundamentals as you are exploring the details, you will create a really interesting drawing style and characters with tons of personality. If you haven't yet, like and subscribe, and thank you very much for watching.
