Character Design Tips for Children’s Book Illustration

One of the first steps when developing a story is to get to know your characters . You want to make sure that your character design is appealing, timeless and has a unique style.

Here are a few tips for developing a character design for children’s books:

Develop your character’s personality

You want to know everything there is to know about them: what they like, what they don’t like, what is their motivation, what is their conflict, etc. 

Silhouettes/ Negative Space

I like to start sketching my characters by making basic graphic shapes as silhouettes. This process helps so that we are able to recognize the character even if we don’t see too many details. When doing this make sure that the proportions of your character are varied so that the design is more interesting. Play with your designs so that the silhouettes are also asymmetrical. This could also help to create more dynamic shapes, you can use their costume, hair or other objects to play with the negative space and to play with the silhouette overall.

Refine/details

Once you have the basic shapes from your silhouette you can go ahead and add the details. Some of these may be facial features, costumes, etc.

Consistency

Be consistent with the style that you’re using for your characters. For example if you’re using a more cartoony style make sure that all of your characters have the same style or if you’re going for a realistic style make sure that you are using this one and that it is accurate. Push the style so that it remains consistent and try to avoid staying in the middle of two very different styles. 

Style & personality

Creating a personal style takes years in the making. If you have found something that you enjoy doing and that you could spend 4, 8, 12 hours working non stop, then this is what you should be doing! -and you should continue developing it.

Do not hide the hands of your characters

When drawing your characters make sure not to hide their hands on their back or in their pockets. We can tell a lot about a character’s personality by their hands.

Using Photo Reference 

This is great for figuring out complex poses or to find out which poses are more interesting than others. You can use photo reference from either Internet or pictures taken by you. 

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How do you create character designs and what is your process?

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