Anthro Character Creation Demo
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So for this tutorial, I'm going to walk you through how to design an anthro character, pose the character and go from sketch quality to final quality. As this is the Legend of Krystal forums, these tips will be geared for sexy characters in sexual situations.
The basic principle behind this whole process is to break everything down into steps so that you don't have to make everything up all at once. Drawing works best when you are not thinking, get your thinking out of the way and then draw.
![Image](http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/draw/04cfe6895ee90412d44f33bc34b6f514)
First, we must define some parameters of the character: personality, body type, animal species, and so on. Usually, I like to pick the animal first and let the features of the animal determine these things for the character. This isn't always the best way. If you are making a world with societes based on species, you might not want all fox-people to have the same personality and body type. If you are making a world with multiple species, try to pick a good variety of animals, like a good mix of carnivores, omnivores and herbivores; mammals, reptiles and birds; fast and slow; etc. If the type of animal is driving the personality and body type, a good mix of animals will give you a good mix of these as well.
(1)
To help figure out the character plan, I find it helpful to draw some gestures of the animal species that the character is based on. I prefer to be super specific about the animal. For example, I've selected the Red Salamander, Pseudotriton Ruber. If I just looked for Salamander, I would get a lot of different species and the different shapes might be confusing as I study them. Find a bunch of pictures of your chosen animal for your reference. Try to find shots of the animal in different poses and from different angles. For a major project, it is also helpful to find some videos of the animal in motion.
(2)
Once we have some reference images, select your best ones and make a gesture drawing of them. Gesture drawings are fast and loose drawings for capturing the general shape and mood of a subject. Or it can just refer to a drawing without the use of construction shapes. Most artists make gestures very squiggly and ungainly, but I cannot bring myself to do this.
Ultimately, you really just want to look closely at your reference images. I find that I'm never looking closely enough unless I'm trying to draw it. Look at your gesture drawing and look at the reference image. If yours doesn't look right, compare them and try to understand why. This will help you to better understand the look of the animal, and will alert you to the subtle features that you can use to make your anthro character more defined and more unique. Try to find features that are unique to your specific animal that will differentiate it from other animal characters or from a basic humanoid. If you have animation in mind, you also want to consider how the animal moves. Consider the agility of a shark compared to the agility of a gazelle or a falcon.
As you make your gesture drawings, really pay attention to the 3D shape of the animal. Consider what the animal will look like from any angle, not just how it looks flat on the page. I have made a few contour lines on these sketches to help show the 3D shape of the salamander, the groove along its spine and the flattened paddle tail.
After carefully studying the red salamander, I have made a list of features that make the salamander a salamander. However, a lot of what you will learn from the gestures will be purely visual and difficult to express with words, so don't get too caught up in list-making and remember to look at your drawings themselves to remember what you learned.
Now we move on to anthropomorphizing the animal. The trick here is to apply the various unique features that you discovered while gesture drawing while keeping the character "human" enough that your audience can still relate to it, or in the case of the LoK forums, jack off to it.
The trick to this, and the reason why anthro-art works at all, is that the brain only looks at certain features when sizing up another human being. This is why a centaur's horse body doesn't bother us, while the wrong kind of eyes can completely creep us out. The brain doesn't care about legs, but it does look at eyes for clues about another human's mood and to identify that human. Or, try to imagine what a human torso looks like from the side. It's tough. You've probably seen thousands of them in your lifetime, but the brain doesn't care what people look like from the side, it uses information from the front view to size up other humans and decide if they are threatening or sexy. The key features that the brain looks at to identify humans are the eyes and mouth on the face (just like a smily) and the shoulders and hips (or butt) on the torso. Altering these features can make the character look too alien. Bird beaks are tough to deal with on anthro characters for this reason.
Another interesting quirk of the human brain is that it has a thing for dogs. The human brain can identify dogs and dog body language almost as well it as it can humans and human body language, but still identifies dogs as non-human. This can be exploited by anthro-artists. Any time you've got an animal that's just too weird, trying mixing in a few dog features. Those bird beaks for example, work better if you treat them more like a dog's snout. In fact, a great deal of cartoon animals are really just funny looking dogs. Sonic the Hedgehog characters are very dog-like, especially Knuckles who has nothing to do with a real-life echidna, and Bugs Bunny's face is as dog-like as it is rabbit-like. To my mind, this is also a pitfall to be avoided. Lazy anthro-artists end up with simple cynocephaly, "dog-headedness", without any interesting animal features in their characters. Try to step it up and use more interesting identifying features in your animal character.
So in the case of our Red Salamander, features like the sideways eyes and goofy mouth make the salamander very unique, but they are not very sexy. The salamander has very short limbs compared to its body. The exact ratio of the salamander's limbs to its body wouldn't be very sexy, but short limbs within human limitation will look okay.
(3)
Making a character unique is all a matter of comparisons. A tall character needs to be taller than someone else. So you need to establish some baseline averages for height, width, curvy-ness, leggy-ness, head-body ratio, shoulder-hips ratio and so on. So for this drawing, I have made a "Default Body" that will represent an average character. Once we have an idea of "average", we can add our unique details to get our unique character.
(4)
Now we draw our new animal themed character next to the average character template. As before, think of your character as a 3D object, not a flat drawing. You can use construction shapes for this if you want, but I find it easier to stick with gestures for this step. Pick a neutral, easy to draw pose. Don't feel compelled to settle on the first thing you jot down. Try different variations, move things around, really spend some time with your character in this step. Stick with basic shape for now. A strong character design should be recognizable by its silhouette. Consider, a tiger and a leopard look different, even if you can't see which one has spots and which one has stripes.
(5)
Once you have something you like, clean up your character sketch. Remove any crossed lines or feathered lines so that you can really see the character, and start adding details and surface features. And it's never too late to make changes, you can see that I shorted the length of the arms during this step. Don't worry about the character's mood and don't try any poses. The idea here is to show ourselves what the character would look like, so that when we draw the character in an expression or a pose later, we don't have to think about what the character looks like.
If you are doing a major project, like a comic or a lengthy animation, consider making a turn-around and reference sheet. A turn-around is a series of drawings of your character from multiple angles. A reference sheet often includes turn-arounds as well as examples of different facial expressions, different outfits, close ups of detailed areas and items or equipment that character carries. These are especially helpful in group projects. Exactly what you need in a reference sheet depends on the scope of your project. I'm not a big fan of doing this since I don't make projects that would call for it, but you can search for "character turn around" and "reference sheet" on deviantArt to see some great examples.
More to follow.
The basic principle behind this whole process is to break everything down into steps so that you don't have to make everything up all at once. Drawing works best when you are not thinking, get your thinking out of the way and then draw.
First, we must define some parameters of the character: personality, body type, animal species, and so on. Usually, I like to pick the animal first and let the features of the animal determine these things for the character. This isn't always the best way. If you are making a world with societes based on species, you might not want all fox-people to have the same personality and body type. If you are making a world with multiple species, try to pick a good variety of animals, like a good mix of carnivores, omnivores and herbivores; mammals, reptiles and birds; fast and slow; etc. If the type of animal is driving the personality and body type, a good mix of animals will give you a good mix of these as well.
(1)
To help figure out the character plan, I find it helpful to draw some gestures of the animal species that the character is based on. I prefer to be super specific about the animal. For example, I've selected the Red Salamander, Pseudotriton Ruber. If I just looked for Salamander, I would get a lot of different species and the different shapes might be confusing as I study them. Find a bunch of pictures of your chosen animal for your reference. Try to find shots of the animal in different poses and from different angles. For a major project, it is also helpful to find some videos of the animal in motion.
(2)
Once we have some reference images, select your best ones and make a gesture drawing of them. Gesture drawings are fast and loose drawings for capturing the general shape and mood of a subject. Or it can just refer to a drawing without the use of construction shapes. Most artists make gestures very squiggly and ungainly, but I cannot bring myself to do this.
Ultimately, you really just want to look closely at your reference images. I find that I'm never looking closely enough unless I'm trying to draw it. Look at your gesture drawing and look at the reference image. If yours doesn't look right, compare them and try to understand why. This will help you to better understand the look of the animal, and will alert you to the subtle features that you can use to make your anthro character more defined and more unique. Try to find features that are unique to your specific animal that will differentiate it from other animal characters or from a basic humanoid. If you have animation in mind, you also want to consider how the animal moves. Consider the agility of a shark compared to the agility of a gazelle or a falcon.
As you make your gesture drawings, really pay attention to the 3D shape of the animal. Consider what the animal will look like from any angle, not just how it looks flat on the page. I have made a few contour lines on these sketches to help show the 3D shape of the salamander, the groove along its spine and the flattened paddle tail.
After carefully studying the red salamander, I have made a list of features that make the salamander a salamander. However, a lot of what you will learn from the gestures will be purely visual and difficult to express with words, so don't get too caught up in list-making and remember to look at your drawings themselves to remember what you learned.
Now we move on to anthropomorphizing the animal. The trick here is to apply the various unique features that you discovered while gesture drawing while keeping the character "human" enough that your audience can still relate to it, or in the case of the LoK forums, jack off to it.
The trick to this, and the reason why anthro-art works at all, is that the brain only looks at certain features when sizing up another human being. This is why a centaur's horse body doesn't bother us, while the wrong kind of eyes can completely creep us out. The brain doesn't care about legs, but it does look at eyes for clues about another human's mood and to identify that human. Or, try to imagine what a human torso looks like from the side. It's tough. You've probably seen thousands of them in your lifetime, but the brain doesn't care what people look like from the side, it uses information from the front view to size up other humans and decide if they are threatening or sexy. The key features that the brain looks at to identify humans are the eyes and mouth on the face (just like a smily) and the shoulders and hips (or butt) on the torso. Altering these features can make the character look too alien. Bird beaks are tough to deal with on anthro characters for this reason.
Another interesting quirk of the human brain is that it has a thing for dogs. The human brain can identify dogs and dog body language almost as well it as it can humans and human body language, but still identifies dogs as non-human. This can be exploited by anthro-artists. Any time you've got an animal that's just too weird, trying mixing in a few dog features. Those bird beaks for example, work better if you treat them more like a dog's snout. In fact, a great deal of cartoon animals are really just funny looking dogs. Sonic the Hedgehog characters are very dog-like, especially Knuckles who has nothing to do with a real-life echidna, and Bugs Bunny's face is as dog-like as it is rabbit-like. To my mind, this is also a pitfall to be avoided. Lazy anthro-artists end up with simple cynocephaly, "dog-headedness", without any interesting animal features in their characters. Try to step it up and use more interesting identifying features in your animal character.
So in the case of our Red Salamander, features like the sideways eyes and goofy mouth make the salamander very unique, but they are not very sexy. The salamander has very short limbs compared to its body. The exact ratio of the salamander's limbs to its body wouldn't be very sexy, but short limbs within human limitation will look okay.
(3)
Making a character unique is all a matter of comparisons. A tall character needs to be taller than someone else. So you need to establish some baseline averages for height, width, curvy-ness, leggy-ness, head-body ratio, shoulder-hips ratio and so on. So for this drawing, I have made a "Default Body" that will represent an average character. Once we have an idea of "average", we can add our unique details to get our unique character.
(4)
Now we draw our new animal themed character next to the average character template. As before, think of your character as a 3D object, not a flat drawing. You can use construction shapes for this if you want, but I find it easier to stick with gestures for this step. Pick a neutral, easy to draw pose. Don't feel compelled to settle on the first thing you jot down. Try different variations, move things around, really spend some time with your character in this step. Stick with basic shape for now. A strong character design should be recognizable by its silhouette. Consider, a tiger and a leopard look different, even if you can't see which one has spots and which one has stripes.
(5)
Once you have something you like, clean up your character sketch. Remove any crossed lines or feathered lines so that you can really see the character, and start adding details and surface features. And it's never too late to make changes, you can see that I shorted the length of the arms during this step. Don't worry about the character's mood and don't try any poses. The idea here is to show ourselves what the character would look like, so that when we draw the character in an expression or a pose later, we don't have to think about what the character looks like.
If you are doing a major project, like a comic or a lengthy animation, consider making a turn-around and reference sheet. A turn-around is a series of drawings of your character from multiple angles. A reference sheet often includes turn-arounds as well as examples of different facial expressions, different outfits, close ups of detailed areas and items or equipment that character carries. These are especially helpful in group projects. Exactly what you need in a reference sheet depends on the scope of your project. I'm not a big fan of doing this since I don't make projects that would call for it, but you can search for "character turn around" and "reference sheet" on deviantArt to see some great examples.
More to follow.