From Chance to Art
The promise of an anime character generator online is magic, but the reality is often a coin flip. Sometimes they get an interesting result that is an unexpected hair colour, a combination of costumes that you would never think of, a facial expression that seems to tell a story. Other times it is a clashing jumble, like three characters were thrown into a blender. The thing is, both are instructive. The positive outcome is a place to start. The bad output gives you a clear indication of what you do not want, which is often more valuable than getting something useful. At the very least you are making progress, something that most blank pages don’t.
The power of a generator is not what it generates. It is the creative friction it creates. If you look at a randomly generated character and you have any reaction to it, even if you are thinking “this is completely wrong and here is specifically why”, you have just gained some specific knowledge about the character you want to draw. This is data. Custom anime art is then based on that sort of concrete information about what the character is and isn’t.
Random Generation is Better than a Blank Page
There’s a certain kind of stasis that occurs when you design characters from scratch. So many choices, so few restrictions, so many possibilities. Character designers are not unfamiliar with this sensation, and most have methods to circumvent it – mood boards, genre, constraints. A generator delivers that constraint without bias and that makes it a useful tool to kick-start the creative process even if it doesn’t deliver a great result.
It’s like a writing prompt. The prompt doesn’t write your story. It provides a sort of friction for your brain to react against, and the story that results from this is often more compelling than anything you would have come up with on your own. It’s the same with a generator. Here, it says, here is a character with purple hair, a robotic arm and it looks like they are dressed up for work. Now do something with that. And now you are problem-solving rather than looking down a creative rabbit hole, which is where you want to be.
Generators work because of the unexpected combinations. By yourself, you tend to gravitate to things that are familiar and logical – things that appeal to your existing taste. A generator is not so constrained. It pairs things that don’t make sense, and sometimes that’s illuminating. A cutesy, watercolor character with pointy clothes. An obviously malevolent shape with friendly colours. Such tensions are the lifeblood of character design and they are more difficult to come up with than stumble into.
What to do with the Generator Output
There is a limit to what a generator can make, and it comes sooner than you think. It produces structure – forms, colours, approximate scale. It cannot make him feel like a person. That’s what is added by custom anime art, and it does not add it through decoration. It does it by interpretation and the choices an artist makes when they look at the generator output and ask themselves: how do I actually personify this and show it?
The first place we see character depth is in posture. A generator will put a character in a standing pose because that’s the default. An experienced artist looks at all the other design choices – the costume, the palette, the head – and wonders what posture would be appropriate for someone dressed and looking like this. Is the weight on the front foot, someone who walks into things? Is it on one heel, someone who observes? These are tiny gestures that can convey a lot of information without the need for text.
It’s the face that is anime art’s greatest strength over other art styles, and why generators, though helpful for starting a design, must eventually be abandoned. Anime face design is a fine art. The shape of the eye determines mood – softer shapes feel friendly and trusting, sharp angles convey suspicion or ferocity. The brow controls mood. The proportions and placement of all these variables, and how they are rendered, creates trustworthy or sinister characters, fresh-eyed or experienced. A generator approximates this. A stylish artist does it masterfully.
Inspiration in the Custom Art Process
Inspiration is not a lightning bolt. It is a process of the collection of references, reactions and semi-formed ideas that reach a critical mass. The generator is one input into that process. A mood board is another. Examples of other characters in the same genre, examples of colours that work for your mood, examples of poses that convey the feeling you are after – these all add to the dialogue between you and the artist who will be producing the final work, and the depth of the dialogue is directly tied to the proximity of the final artwork to your vision.
Being descriptive of mood rather than look is a good practice when commissioning art from a generator. “I want her to look like she is exhausted but not giving up” is better than “give her dark circles under her eyes.” “Make him look like he’s three steps ahead of you” is better than “give him a scheming look.” These emotional briefs are more difficult for the writer to write than visual briefs, but they make for better art because they provide the artist with something to aspire to instead of a picture to reproduce.
The color story of a character is another inspiration lever. There are meanings in colors that people understand subconsciously – most people can feel a meaning in a color story before they can name it. Colors that are muted with the occasional warm accent are different to fresh primaries. A generator will give you one color story by chance. With custom art, you can be deliberate about it, to create a palette that matches the personality rather than fights it. It’s this kind of thing that makes a character memorable or not.
Ultimately, what a generator begins, and custom anime art completes, is an image of an idea. The idea is in your mind, vague, somewhat nebulous. The generator gives it approximate shape. The artist gives it detail and definition. Each stage is necessary. None of them alone is sufficient. It’s a partnership between a machine, an artist and you, the one who knows the character best.