How to make the characters in your artwork act with real personality

01. First iteration, exploring poses

Firstly, I establish the overarching narrative. In this case, I want the focal point to be revolving around the interaction between the girl and her monkey. They should feel dynamic, playful and showcasing some type of bonding between each other.

Once I have a clear direction, I put down some scribbles to find main the lines of action. Usually in gestures, the axes of the shoulders and hips are crucial, along with curve of the spine.

02. Second iteration

In this example, I thought the girl twisting herself to face the pet might be an interesting addition to her pose: it could push the overall gesture and emphasise the dynamism.

Narratively, this also plays into the character’s story, as she is supposed to be a travelling circus performer; so we can imagine her to be very active, cheerful and hopping around stage in between tricks, to feed or talk with her monkey.

03. Fleshing out the volumes

As the main gesture is taking shape, I start to flesh out the characters’ volumes a bit more and I want to focus on the interactions between the two figures. I’m establishing the overlaps of all the elements and making sure I don’t create too many tangents that may flatten the drawing too much or make it difficult to read

04. Costume and props

At this stage, the thumbnail already gives me a clear enough idea of the general structure and pose, so I can redraw the character on top and focus on details like costumes, props and facial expressions.

To do this stage, I keep the initial thumbnail underneath and turn it to cyan colour so that it doesn’t create too much noise and doesn’t interfere with the black lines on top.

05. Costume and props, part 2

It is important at this stage that I don’t stick too closely to the thumbnail and try to approach it as if I was redoing it from scratch. I also want this step to be very quick: my goal is just to communicate the design effectively, but I’m aware that all elements might still be subject to change.

I also tilt the angle of the monkey’s head to face the girl so that the interaction feels a bit stronger

06. Picking the winner and feedback

The second option is the client’s pick. It does indeed feel more active and dynamic compared to the first one. Before moving to final drawing, they ask me to add some type of weapon to the character, something that she can use for fighting but also for her circus repertoire.

I think this small change helps in creating a better silhouette too. Here I’m showing how I quickly have sketched it over the previous drawing.

07. Finalising the design

Now that I’ve updated the rough sketch, I can proceed to final drawing. You can also see that, along with the client’s feedback, I’ve applied some other minor changes of my own.

The girl’s fan is now at her waist along with a bottle; the monkey is now looking at the grape while his arm is reaching out to grab it. I think it creates a better dynamic in terms of acting.

08. Finalising the design, part 2

For this final sketch, my goal is to be a bit more precise without losing too much of the gesture and expression of the initial sketch. To do that, I try again to approach it as if I’m drawing it from scratch and the previous sketch is left at a very low opacity underneath as a general guideline.

I keep the lines understated and not too dark because it will make it easier to apply colours afterwards.

09. Placing flat colours

I want to go with a watercolour-like feel to this character, so I start with some understated soft tones. I try to avoid too many hard edges or to fill in the shape of the objects too perfectly and add a bit of variation in hue to each of the flat colours.

10 Lights and shadows

Here I’m intensifying the lights around the focal point, introducing some highlights and adding some slight temperature shifts from light to shadows. I’m also starting to add some occlusion and cast shadows, while still keeping it pretty loose.

This is the step that I send to the client for approving the colours

11. Painting on top

Previous colour steps were done underneath the lines; now I’m going on top and painting. The image will remain ideally the same, but I will turn some of the soft edges into harder ones.

I want to emphasise the characters’ facial expressions while keeping them ‘soft’ enough, so in this case I started defining the monkey, the hands and other elements important for conveying the gesture first, and left the girl’s face for last.

12. Defining the face

I want to do minimal changes to the original sketch, so I limit myself to just covering those desaturated shadows and transitions that transpire from the drawing with warmer and brighter shadows.

At the same time, I push the contrast of a few areas where you would have occlusion shadows, to help the form read

13. Tightening the rest of the image

At this stage, the image feels complete enough. All the elements of the character have been covered in terms of rendering and the gesture and acting of the two figures looks believable to me. But I am noticing some inconsistencies that I’ll fix in the next stage.

14. Final adjustments

To finalise the character, I keep defining some of the major volumes, to make sure they read as tridimensional from a zoomed out view. I also ended up adjusting the gesture of the hand holding the staff and reducing the size of the other one.

In the end, I think I captured the playful vibe that I was going for this character, although I’d probably approach it in a different way if I where to redo it now.