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How to Create Characters That Art Directors Fall in Love With
- Matthew R. Paden
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
Great character design isn’t just about a cute face or a slick silhouette — it’s about communicating who the character is at a glance, and then delivering enough variety, nuance, and personality that an art director can see them in a scene, a shot list, or an entire campaign.
Below I’ll walk you through the creative and practical steps that make characters magnetic: believability, shape language, expression and pose sheets, personality-driven design, and how to present your work so art directors stop scrolling and start calling.
1) Start with story-first believability
Even the most stylized cartoon character must feel like a person who exists in a world. Believability isn’t photorealism — it’s consistency and motivation.
How to build it:
Give them a clear goal and a consistent set of physical/behavioral rules. What do they want? What are they willing to do to get it? Those answers inform posture, costume, age cues, and recurring props.
Think about the character’s environment and job. A factory mechanic, a retired sea captain, or a tween skateboarder each have functional details that anchor design decisions.
Use contradiction intentionally. A hulking, gentle grocery clerk is more interesting than another hulking villain — the contrast tells story.
Why art directors care: they hire characters that can be cast in a project — characters need to support story beats, emotional arcs, and audience empathy right from design passes.
2) Shape language: the visual shorthand for personality
Shape language — using circles, squares, and triangles and their combinations — is one of the fastest ways to communicate personality visually.
It’s a toolkit that designers use to encode traits before a viewer reads a line or hears a word.
The Walt Disney Archives’ primer on shape language explains that shapes “tell a story, show personality, and elicit an emotional response” simply by silhouette and proportion. Walt Disney Family Museum
Practical rules:
Circles/ovals = softness, friendliness, approachability. Great for sidekicks, children, and comedic characters.
Squares/rectangles = stability, stubbornness, reliability, sometimes rigidity. Use for authority figures, stoic types.
Triangles = sharpness, danger, dynamism, or cunning. Triangular shapes suit antagonists, edgy heroes, or speed-focused designs.
Combine shapes to create visual tension: a round head with angular shoulders suggests humor with bite; a triangular torso with circular face can read as agile but likable.
Exercises to practice:
Thumbnail dozens of silhouettes using one primary shape family.
Redesign familiar characters by forcing them into one different dominant shape — this trains you to see how shape affects perception.
3) Silhouette and readability: make them recognizable in black
If you squint, or turn the character into pure black, can you still read what they are?
Art directors routinely judge silhouette as it determines legibility in thumbnails, storyboards, thumbnails, posters, and small UI icons.
Tips:
Exaggerate one unmistakable silhouette feature (hat, cowl, huge shoulders, distinctive hair).
Keep major read directions clear (is the weight on one leg? Are the arms clearly separated from the body?)
Test at thumbnail scale (as small as a postage stamp) — if it reads there, it will read across media.
4) Expression sheets and pose sheets: show the acting range
A model sheet is the proof of life. It tells the art director: “This character can do the job.”
Expression and pose sheets show emotional range, attitude, and how the design behaves in motion and reaction.
What to include:
A head expression sheet with 8–12 core emotions (neutral, joy, anger, confusion, sly, worried, determined, sad). Domestika’s practical breakdown of expression sheets recommends using these to discover personality — drawing emotions often reveals new costume or silhouette cues. Domestika
A full-body pose sheet: neutral, action, relaxed, defensive, celebratory, slumped, etc.
A turnaround (front/3-quarter/side/back) so 3D artists and layout people know exact volumes.
Props and interaction sketches — show the character with their essential object(s).
Why it wins art directors:
Expression & pose sheets reduce guesswork for animators, illustrators, and directors.
They show you’ve thought beyond a single pose — you’re designing a living participant in production.
5) Personality-driven design: everything should read back to the personality
A strong design answers: Who is this person and what do they want right now?
Every choice — from nose shape down to shoe scuffs — should support personality.
Tom Bancroft’s core message in Creating Characters with Personality underscores shapes, proportion, and small design decisions as narrative tools; think of design details as the character’s biography on the page.
Checklist to enforce personality:
Silhouette → primary mood (soft/round = gentle; angular = aggressive).
Gesture → habitual posture (hands-on-hips = confident; slouched = weary).
Costume/props → occupation, income, and priorities (practical boots vs. pristine brogues).
Small quirks → a missing button, a pencil behind ear, a scar with implied story.
6) Expression over illustration: design for emotion, not just style
Animation veterans remind us to “animate what the character is thinking” — those internal motivations should be embedded in design and acting poses. Glen Keane famously said:
“Don’t animate what the character is doing, animate what the character is thinking.”
That insight applies equally to static design: craft features that can perform internally (eyebrows, posture, mouth shapes) so the character can act even in a still.
Practical application:
Emphasize eyebrow shapes and flexible mouth lines — these are most expressive across many styles.
Design noses, chins, and jawlines that move the eye path to the emotion (strong jaw for resolute, droop for sorrow).
When drawing expressions, exaggerate until the emotion reads strongly — then dial back to the final style.
7) Color, contrast, and material choices: visual shorthand for mood
Color choices say a lot quickly. A palette strategy makes characters pop in layouts and communicates psychological cues.
Guidelines:
Limit the palette to 2–4 dominant colors plus neutrals; this preserves readability.
Use saturation and temperature to signal temperament: warm saturated colors = energetic, cool desaturated = reserved.
Consider materials: shiny leather vs. worn denim tells different economic and story signals.
HOT TIP:
Design a “color story” sheet showing the palette applied to the full turn-around and to key props/garments.
8) Test the design with thumbnails and thumbnails again
Before you commit to details, produce dozens of thumbnail concepts. The best designs often come from iterating quickly and discarding many near-misses.
A quick workflow:
40 thumbnails focusing on silhouette/shape only.
12 refined thumbnails exploring head/face variation.
6 semifinal concepts with basic colors and one or two poses.
Final art with polished turnarounds and expression sheets.
This fast-to-slow funnel proves you’re exploring possibilities rather than forcing the first idea.
9) Presenting to art directors: deliver answers, not questions
Art directors are busy — they want the least friction path to green-lighting your design.
Presentation best practices:
Start with a one-sentence character hook (“Marta: a 32-year-old night-shift bike courier who collects broken watches”).
Show silhouette first, then turnaround, then expression/pose sheets, then color studies.
Include a short “usage notes” section: what makes the character work in animation, comic panels, merchandise, or UI?
Deliver files cleanly (labeled layers, vector or high-res PNGs/PSD, and a PDF splice for quick viewing).
Pro tip: art directors love evidence of problem-solving. If the brief said “make them stand out on a crowded poster,” show a mock poster with your character to prove the concept works.
10) Learn from the masters — quotes & resources to explore
Two short, readable quotes to keep in your sketchbook:
“Shape Language is a concept used in art and animation to communicate meaning based on shapes we are familiar with. When used in character, object, and background design, shapes can tell a story, show personality, and elicit an emotional response in the viewer without using any words.” — Walt Disney
Further reading (solid sources):
Tom Bancroft — Creating Characters with Personality (book). Essential practical rules about proportion, rhythm, and personality. Amazon
Walt Disney Archives — Shape Language PDF (excellent primer on shape psychology). Walt Disney Family Museum
Domestika — “How to Create an Expression Sheet” (practical, step-by-step guide). Domestika
11) Common pitfalls and how to avoid them
Pitfall: Over-detailing early. Solution: keep early thumbnails abstract, save texture and micro-detail for the final pass.
Pitfall: Designing for your personal taste but not the brief. Solution: always check the brief and produce at least three directions that satisfy it.
Pitfall: Weak acting range. Solution: produce at least 8 distinct facial expressions and 6 poses; if those don’t read easily, the design needs reworking.
Pitfall: Static silhouette. Solution: add a unique pose or accessory that breaks symmetry and gives movement potential (a trailing scarf, an off-kilter hat).
12) A closing workflow you can steal (30–90 minutes to a strong concept)
5–10 min: one-sentence bio + three keywords (e.g., “scrappy, optimistic, resourceful”).
10–20 min: 30–50 silhouette thumbnails focusing on shape language.
10–20 min: 8 head thumbnails exploring face shapes and eyes.
10–20 min: 3–5 refined thumbnails with costume ideas and one pose each.
20–40 min: final turnaround + 8 expression heads + 4 poses (this is the deliverable for a portfolio or pitch).
Follow this rhythmic sprint and you’ll have both variety and depth — the exact combination art directors reward.
Final thoughts: design for decisions, not just decoration
How to create characters that art directors fall in love with:
Art directors hire characters that solve visual storytelling problems: they must be legible at scale, capable of emotion, and ready to function across production.
If you design with story-first believability, clear shape language, robust expression/pose sheets, and an eye for presentation, you move from “nice drawing” to “production-ready character.”
Practice the exercises above, study the masters, and present your work so that the next person who opens your portfolio can immediately see how the character will live in their project.
