What is a character study?
Getting started to draw characters.
When you’re drawing a story, a childrens book or series of illustrations with the same character, doing a character study is the process of depicting a character’s appearance, personality and emotions.
The sketches aim to capture details like physical features, facial expressions, body language or even clothing and how it looks in various situations.
The more times you draw your character the more you get to know it, and it becomes easier to draw it on several pages again and again (and again and again…)
Below is described one way of getting started drawing a character study. For the purpose of this example a sweet fluffy toy bunny was selected.
The original study is made with pencil on plain paper. The paper was scanned and imported into Procreate on iPad. In procreate the lines where drawn digitally – using the foto on a separate layer for guidance – and then colour where added.
How to get started drawing a character study
Find a piece of toy, a teddy bear, a small fluffy animal – as long as it has a face.
Set a timer for 2 minutes and draw the toy as you see it.
Then think about different feelings.
- Happy
- Sad
- Angry
- Scared
- In love
- …
Choose one, set the timer for two minutes and draw the character in that emotion. Choose the next and carry on getting to know your character.
Move on to different actions.
- Jumping
- Dancing
- Flying
- Falling
- …
Continue to fill your paper with different studies on how the character reacts (looks like) in every chosen emotion and action.
