The Bar for Digital Creation is Set by Anime
Something changed in the past few years. The standard for a creative project no longer required advanced technical skills, professional software or years of training. Those with no experience with drawing tablets began to create characters that had personality and appeal. The fact that anyone could make anime character online without having to learn how to draw for years opened up a door that many didn’t know they were locked out of. And custom anime art was there to greet them.
The thing about this change is that it’s not only more people who are producing. And what they are creating – and why. When it comes to art communities that focus on the anime aesthetic online, the art is warmer, more emotive and more character-focused than most other online art sub-communities. The style lends itself to authenticity. You can draw an anime character who’s angry, heartbroken, hopeful, or determined, and it will all register in the same visceral way. That’s why this style has been so effective at supporting positive art.
It’s a Medium for Emotional Expression
The relationship between emotion and the visual language of anime is specific, and it’s important to know this before you set out to design characters. Proportions are stylised not naturalistic. Eyes are bigger because eyes are the seat of emotion and bigger eyes communicate more emotion. Saturation increases because bland, naturalistic tones don’t convey the same sense of hope or happiness or indignation. The style is exaggerated for a reason. It’s exaggerated because the feelings it’s meant to communicate are big and true and need to be given a style that can communicate them.
And this is especially true for creators of positive work. If you’re creating a character with a positive message, a character who exemplifies persistence or a plot that’s about learning and hope, the anime style has that built in. If you’re showcasing a character who is nice and hardy, you don’t have to tell people that much – the design tells them. The bright eyes and the stance and the choice of colours all communicate “this person doesn’t give up” before the story gives us reason to think it. That’s important in digital media, where you may have around three seconds to convince someone of something before they click away.
Why Personal Is Better Than Off-the-Shelf
Character generators are great. Nobody’s pretending otherwise. You can put together a passable anime character in 10 minutes without any effort other than pointing and clicking. But there’s a limit to what you can create with a template, and that limit is “technically an anime character”. It can’t produce personality. It can’t produce the design that makes someone stop in their tracks because they were drawn to something about the character they can’t quite articulate.
There’s no limit to what you can do with custom anime art. It’s slower, more deliberate, and requires you to define more about the character and its purpose. In return you get a character that stands in as your own rather than a catalog of characters. When working on digital creations for uplifting the audience – whether it’s webcomics, original stories, characters for social media, or community mascots – character and authenticity is everything. custom anime art. People can tell when you care about your character. They respond to it.
Then there’s a practical aspect that people don’t always consider: consistency. If you create a character using the template, you’re reliant on the template. If you have a character with its own reference sheet, you have something that is yours. Because the character is independent of any medium, you can do anything with it: use it on a different project, in a different format, with a different artist.
The Brief Is Where the Magic Starts
If you’re a first-time collaborator with an artist to create a custom character, the brief can be a lot of homework. What do you say? How much is too much? Almost always: the more, the better, and the things that feel too specific are the most useful. An artist can work with “this character grew up by the ocean and still craves salty snacks when they’re upset” but they can’t work with “give her a chill vibe”.
The brief is like a character interview. What do they want most in the world? What are they afraid of? How do they relate to others? What do they do in secret? Those questions might sound more like the stuff of fiction writing, than the stuff of design, but they inform visual choices. The character who more than anything wishes to be seen? Will be different than the character who more than anything wishes to melt into a crowd. One is more “visual”. The other’s design is more difficult to define.
For designers creating inspirational characters, the design brief might better be written in terms of the journey, not just the final destination. Your character might end up self-assured and kind, but the design is more interesting if there’s something about them that shows they’ve been through it. A scar that’s not threatening. An open but not vulnerable stance. These types of details make the uplift an earned quality.
It’s All Coming Together, Now
Creating an animated character online is a practical process of many steps, but it can be overwhelming if you do it all at once. The easiest way to do this is to start small and build upon your ideas. Starting with the things you know for sure – personality, role, the emotional purpose of the character in your project. Then expand to the directing. And seek out the right creative partner or tool for the job, based on the stage you’re at, not the stage at which you want to be.
You’ll see, if you take the time, that creating anime characters online is a thinking process. The design decisions you make tell you what you want to achieve. The brief you write reveals to you things you didn’t know about your character. The revision notes you write to an artist help you take stock of your creative priorities in ways that talking about them can’t. It’s a creative discussion, and as with any creative discussion, it takes you somewhere that you mightn’t expect.