Artist insight
15 TIPS FOR STYLISH CHARACTER DESIGN
Concept artist François Bourdin shares pro advice to help you achieve accurate proportions for engaging, stylised characters
Artist PROFILE
François Bourdin
LOCATION: France
François a concept artist specialising in character creation. Over five years in the industry, he has worked on several video and board games and films, most notably for Netflix and Supercell. https://bit.ly/4fmCp6G
Achieving the right shapes in your characters is essential to getting messages across to the viewer effectively. In this article, I’ll show you how to create effective character designs with strong, simple shapes. To do this, I work with a lot of reference photos to find and build solid poses that match the spirit of my characters. I’ll then compose a
colour palette that will match up with my character’s personality. I love to mix pastel shades with neon hues in particular. I’ll start with my base colours for clothes and skin, then shadows and highlights, and finally background colours and graphic touches. My backgrounds are often simple colour gradients with a few simplified elements.