My All-Time Favorite Trick to Character Design (Patreon)

Art is similar to learning an instrument in that no matter how long you do it, you’ll always have something new to learn! And I feel like I’m at least somewhat qualified to make that statement.

That said, knowing the fundamentals is always going to be beneficial, so I’d like to today expound on a handy little trick that I use all the time when it comes to character design.

Essentially, it comes down to the golden ratio! Now I’m sure there has been plenty said about this subject before by people smarter than me so I won’t be going to deep into it. But the long and short of it is, we’re hard-wired to find this specific ratio aesthetically pleasing.

Thus, a ton of your favorite character designs use it. And you can too!

This is a set of calipers that are set to always display the golden ratio. No matter how wide you open them, you can make three points that are spaced apart just right, leading to two spaces: a smaller and a larger one. Now, try to design a character within those proportions!

First, set the points…

Then, decide if you want the head + torso to be in one, or the torso + legs, and see how it looks.

Voila! R.O.B. here is stylized and a little different from the official one, but he’s looking good to me.

You can even play around with the proportions. Maybe the head can take up the entirety of one of the sections for a chibi look, or the legs could be super-long. Let’s see how Dragon Quest XI’s Hero would look in a variety of different proportions, all using the ratio:

((in the following images, I mixed around the A and B accidentally but the point should still stand))

This is how all my BitMusical character design starts, with the ratio, then me testing a few things to see which one I like the most. As you can see, the left two Elevens use the smaller proportion for the legs. The first one on the left uses the larger portion within the top part for the head, while the one next to him uses the smaller one for a longer torso. But he looks a bit too much like an orangutan for my tastes, so I tried a couple others.

Hero number 3 has very long legs and a tiny torso for an exaggerated look, while number 4 has a big ol’ head and resembles Mega Man from Boss Select in terms of chibified proportions. Of the four, I think I like the leftmost one the most.

As you can see from the lowercase a/b bits, it’s important to look within the characters to see other places you can fit the golden ratio. You can section off characters with things like belts, joints, the bottoms of tunics and the tops of boots.

And of course, facial features! Which I demonstrate here with the official art of our boy:

Lookin’ mathematical, Eleven!

Hopefully this is enlightening (if you weren’t already aware of it). I find it’s a great starting point for character design, so try practicing it yourself to play with proportions. And if you’d like a set of your own calipers, I got mine from Stephen Silver, the character designer of Kim Possible, who can be found here: https://silvertoons.wixsite.com/goldensection It’s only ten bucks and he even signed it for me so that’s nifty. Now go! Create!

-By Matthew