What I'm Learning About Characters 🎨 Real-time Process Video (Patreon)

Hello lovelies,

I've just finished the challenge for this month's Creative Illustration Curriculum, and you can join me for my quiet, real-time art process in the video above 💖 Beautiful Bluebells will be getting a voice-overed version soon where I talk about my process as I go.

My learning focus this month is adding personality to characters with visual cues like their outfit, accessories and expressions.

Characters are so much fun to make, I feel like a little kid again with a dress up doll deciding what outfit they should wear!

I set the challenge this month to: draw a character who is joyful, friendly and loves gardening, expressing that through their clothes, accessories and expression.

So I started with some brainstorming sketches to play with simple joyful expressions, explore what accessories a gardener might be holding and then sketched a draft of a cute bear character.

Then I drew a digital version in Procreate which turned out really cute! You can watch a real-time video of my full drawing process above (or change the speed manually if you'd like to watch it sped up because it's quite long).

Do they look like a joyful bear who likes gardening to you?

Or maybe they just look like they've been shopping at the farmer's market 😅

The key things I wanted to express visually for this character were:

a joyful expression

an outfit suitable for gardening

accessories that a gardener would be holding

vibrant, joyful colours

cuteness overload

So here's what I've been learning about visually expressing a character's personality:

You can express so much information about a character with the choices that you make drawing them. Their current expression and what they're holding tells us the story of what they're doing right now, but their outfit tells us a bit more about who they are generally.

I found it really helpful to imagine what outfit I would choose if I were a joyful bear who liked gardening. I would definitely choose fun, vibrant clothes that are practical in the garden 🌼🥕

Colours are important too! A joyful character is likely to wear joyful colours, but a serious character is more likely to wear serious/neutral colours.

Drawing cute animal characters in clothes is one of my favourite things to do 😍

Don't forget to download this month's curriculum pdf guide if you'd like to join in!

💖 Mimi