Create Professional Character Designs in Photoshop

In this video, Tyler outlines the concepts and process of creating "Kari", our fantasy mage, so we have an idea of the professional pipeline we'll be following for this course.

In this video, Tyler discusses questions every concept artist needs to ask themselves in order to create a compelling character that makes sense with the narrative setting. Creating the story for our character will help us to create a more believable character that will meet our client's needs.

In the first part, Tyler looks at free sketching some design aspects based on the questions we answered in the last video. He also covers the 7 different soul types that characters typically fall under and how that affects our design.

In the second part of this topic, Tyler takes the groundwork that's been done and begins to sketch out the actual design elements. Using a simple round brush, he works out basic shapes and silhouettes that fit our character archetype.

In the final part of this topic, Tyler lays in basic color schemes, looking at a method that mimics traditional underpainting as he finalizes the initial idea for this character.

Having created an initial sketch to find the essence of the character, we now take all of the ideas and parameters we've created and begin to silhouette different looks for our character based on simple shapes and values to find the design aesthetic we will finalize.

Continuation of Character Silhouettes

We review all of the design silhouettes we've created and continue to ask ourselves questions about our character so that even the silhouette compels us to want to know more about this character. Using elements of multiple

We look at the quick production methods for getting proportions correct on our character. Simple methods that are easy to remember and allow us to get a good human proportion without investing more time than needed.

In this video, we look at methods for finding character reference for our design, and the different elements included in the overall term “reference”.

Our foundation has been explored, now we move onto a more in depth sketch that explores the aesthetic and needs of our character. In this phase we'll work out both a look that we really like, but also would work within the world of the character. In the first part we'll look at a method for blocking that sketch in.

Continuation of Comprehensive Sketches

In this part we'll continue the work from the previous video, this time taking the approach of sketching in our character rather than blocking it out.

Tyler discusses various methods for deciding on a color palette for our character. The importance of a dominant color and how to choose complementary colors for our design.

Before the creation of our final image, we spend some time looking at gesture drawing. These are the skills that allow us to create a dynamic, believable pose for our character.

We've reached the final push! We'll start by doing a basic block-in of color, paying attention to values and schemes we've researched in previous work.

Continuation of the Color Block-In video.

With our basic colors blocked in, we move on to the secondary detail. As well as continuing to add color and light, we also start to finalize the textures we want to create.

Continuation of the Starting Detail video.

In our last videos, we make the final push to really polish our character. Tyler looks at the details and thought process needed to create the next level of polish to really make our character shine!

Tyler looks at the details and thought process needed to create the next level of polish to really make our character shine!