How to use lore to drive your character designs

01. Choose key storytelling elements

Our character is the queen, running away with her son from the insane king, his poisoned kingdom and a murderous cult. To start defining her, let’s focus on key elements of the plot that affect the queen’s reality.

The fact that she’s a queen already brings interesting visual elements: a crown, jewellery, fine clothing. However, the background is unsettling. There’s a curse, insane people, the urge to flee. Take note of the key elements you can find

02. Expand and correlate ideas

Now that we have the base ideas for our character and the world, let’s take the key elements above and expand them. What pops into your mind when you think of a queen, a curse, or a person who’s fleeing a dangerous situation?

Brainstorm a bit and work up the early ideas, adding new concepts and meanings to them. I’m using Xmind, a mindmap software, to organise my ideas.

03. Search for visual reference

By following this process, we end up with lots of concepts that not only help to define our character’s visuals, but also her emotions, state of mind and her reality.

With all this information, the next step is to search for visual references that somehow match the looks and mood you’re planning for your character to convey. All these concepts and references will serve as inspiration for our design.

04. Iterate on posing

Now, let’s explore the pose of the queen. This is a troubling moment for both characters. The queen is scared, fears for her life and her child’s, and can trust no one. Considering this, let’s go with slightly dynamic poses, adding some twisting motion to her body – something that reflects her fear and uneasiness.

The goal is to create quick, simple poses, focusing on gesture instead of structure or anatomy.

05. Refine the base drawing

After choosing the best-fitting pose for the character, let’s refine it a bit. What I’m doing here is mainly adjusting proportions, simplifying the line work and adding more anatomy to the queen and her son.

Notice that I split the refinement into two steps, first by adding more anatomy, and then cleaning the line and fine-tuning the characters’ facial expressions.

06. Iterate on costuming

We’ve already put some effort into posing our characters in a way that’s appropriate for their backstory. Now it’s time to do the same with their costumes. Even though she’s the queen, our character is also trying to escape and avoid danger.

The challenge here will be to make her look like a queen, but not in an obvious way, because the moment she’s experiencing demands she goes unnoticed.

07. Final line art

After choosing a general direction for our character’s clothes and items, it’s time to refine them even further, using the design exploration as a base to create a final line art. This will guide the next phase, making it much simpler to proceed with the painting steps.

08. Base colour and silhouette

Once the line work is done, we’ll create a flat coloured layer underneath the line art. This layer will work as our character’s silhouette.

You can choose any colour for it, because it’ll only serve as a frame, almost like a clipping mask to which we’ll bind the actual painting layers. To bind a layer to another one, hold Alt/Option+ click, with the mouse cursor between the two layers.

09. Bringing in local values

Now we’re ready to add some values to this character on another layer. Limit your values to three or five options. The goal is to explore local values, dividing them between light, medium and dark.

This will be the base of the painting. This layer goes on top of the silhouette. Bind this new layer to the silhouette layer.

10. Refining form with shadows

On top of the local values layer, we’ll create a new layer set to Multiply, and start adding all kinds of shadows to our painting. To support storytelling, I want the painting to be dark overall, making it half-lit.

This directs our focus to their faces and the queen’s expression, while also creating uneasiness, as if she were walking down a dark alley and was suddenly hit by a light.

11. Adding more light to the composition

With the shadows established, let’s create another layer on top of it and set it to Screen mode. The goal here is to power up the contrast and recover some elements that have been lost in the shadow side.

I’m doing this by adding a secondary source of light, coming from the left. The main advantage of keeping everything separate is that you can easily tweak lights, shadows and local values.

12. Introduce a digital ‘glazing’ stage

Now, just like glazing on traditional oil painting, we’ll start adding colour to our characters by creating a new layer on top of the greyscale, set to Hard Light mode. I’m making the colours somewhat desaturated to match the painting’s mood and backstory.

Notice that adding colour will change the previously created value structure. So, always check your values as you paint, making sure not to change them too much

13. Rendering the artwork

After all these steps, I create a new Normal layer on top of everything, including the line work, to focus on the rendering. Most of the work goes into polishing their faces and clothing.

At the same time, I increase the contrast slightly and add some shapes to the background, further highlighting the characters’ faces

14. Finishing touches

Now that everything’s in place, we can work on some finishing touches, creating new layers to tweak the lights and shadows, change the contrast or add small details. I increase the contrast and add blood droplets to their faces and clothing.

Notice how, even in the last steps of the process, it’s still possible to add storytelling elements to our design and take it up a notch!