do you have any advice on character design?
watch The Sopranos
i actually wanted to elaborate on this and say that i think it’s a really bad habit of a lot of artists, influenced by current media casting practices, to unconsciously or consciously make every single character they create super pretty, like everyone is just hot in that very boring, homogenous way, and this also comes as a result of people using actors and celebrities as character references or faceclaims and AI facial generation programs like Artbreeder being trained on people who are generally very pretty-looking. it results in alienating, uncanny worlds and drawings completely devoid of people who just look like regular people. it results worlds populated by mannequins fresh off the CW. I feel like whether a character is attractive or not should actually matter, be part of their character, because that kind of thing absolutely affects the way you move through the world and the way the world treats you.
so i wanted to throw in some suggestions that, whenever I’m trying to find a character reference or otherwise draw very interesting-looking yet regular-looking people, which i usually have to do for bit characters in @ikroah or something, I tend to look for references in the following places. these are far from the only reliable way to get inspiration, this is just a non-exhaustive list of places i’ve looked before for visual inspiration when needing to create a character, whether starring characters or background ones:
pre-2000s television (The Sopranos and Twin Peaks especially having incredible character design)
extras in comedy sketch shows
esports players
real photos (not staged stock photos) of line cooks
70s baseball players
athletes from more obscure olympic sports like the javelin toss or greco-roman wrestling, especially if you’re looking for a specific body type
ska, jazz, and blues musicians
firefighters
improv troupes
for teenagers, searching “high school english class project” on youtube and sorting by Upload Date
state senators, small-town mayors, and generally obscure local government positions like comptroller or treasurer (yes i know politicians can be bad sometimes but smaller elections especially don’t really depend on looks)
people who walk by your window (if you live in a city like I do)
and again these are just, in my opinion, deep and easy wells to dive in if you want to get a good idea of what regular people look like. these suggestions aren’t the limits on where you can possibly find inspiration for character design
Read classic hardboiled novels like Chandler and pay close attention to how people are described with greater variety and specificity than is allowed to appear (especially in women) on screen media for the most part.
(Obviously skip the of-it’s-time racism in terms of what you take direct inspiration from for this purpose)
