Hello, this may seem a bit off, or rather something unexpected but I have been wondering how you design characters. I have always drawn not exactly realistic, but I have never drawn cartoon like. I love the cartoon and realistic style, but the ideas of having a cartoon like ideas like teh way you draw your astrotrain, or your evil villain mixmaster, I don’t know how to do this. I was wondering if you had any tips, I’ve been wanting to try a cartoonist style or a style similar to yours, I want to be less detail in my drawing but I don’t know how to start. If you do answer this, thank you even if you don’t have an answer or a way to explain.
Lots of text in those images, so I'll summarize that and give more thoughts!
But if your ability to design and stylize is what you're wanting to work on, I think this process will help you! Character design is a super broad topic, so it's hard to dive into how I consider every aspect of it in one post. Though I'd love to dig into different character design ideas in the future. Maybe streams or video essays? I dunno at this moment.
This process is more about learning what you want from your work and evolving it since it seems like where you're stuck is what you want from your art. So I recommend my "draw, reflect, exercise, redraw, repeat" way of practicing. My methods of practice aren't perfect or an exact science, but they have helped me a lot. And the idea of them is more about finding what you like and how to do it.
Step one is to draw. A design or illustration. Whatever you're wanting to make! Step two is to look at what you've made and ask yourself how you could make it closer to what you want it to be. "What do I want to change about this design?", "What art skills could I study up on that would help me make those changes?", and "What artists do I like that do those skills well that I can learn from by viewing their work and trying to apply the things I like about theirs in my own way?" are all really helpful to ask yourself! And the nice thing is, the answers to these will basically tell you what to study next. It'll give you skills to research techniques for and artists to look through for inspiration. And then you just redraw and apply what you've practiced. And you do that again. "Your art will look off to you until it doesn't look off anymore" is something I like to remember.
Art to me is finding your own solutions to problems with endless answers. I feel like I see a ton of art tutorials like "THIS is the RIGHT way to draw". And not that all those videos have unhelpful exercises or advice if they teach you the way you want to draw. But I think it's a more healthy relationship to have with your work to just figure out what you want from it and nurture it that way than to be determined to fit a specific mold that you might not necessarily enjoy. I have a basic understanding of perspective, but I still bend or break perspective "rules" for my transformers art. Having the basic understanding helps a lot in making it still look nice while I break the rules, so I studied up on perspective for a while with some basic exercises so I could apply it the way I wanted. And you can do that with pretty much any art skill.
That's my overview on ways of developing your work more where you want it to go, and I hope it helps. Always feel free to ask more art stuff if you like! I like to chat about my process, and if it helps others, than heck yeah I will talk about it XD Thank you for the kind words and stay cool out there!
