Artist insight

Hardy Fowler shares his simple but effective shape principles that lead to dynamic, interesting character designs every time

Designing and painting characters that have the elusive ‘cool factor’ can be like trying to capture lightning in a bottle. What makes one character cool and another one not? Over a long career, I have boiled down a formula that leads to reliably cool results every time – and it all revolves around one key element.

Shape is the most fundamental and powerful element of visual design. Our eyes just seem to recognise and process shapes more easily than other elements like value and colour – think of how you can identify popular characters just from their silhouette. Character designers can take advantage of this by designing directly with shapes.

Instead of exhaustive sketching or line art (which is time-consuming and often gets painted over anyway), I find that blocking in shapes directly has some huge upsides.

It lets us truly see our designs instantly, and it helps us avoid any shape or silhouette surprises that seem to always happen when we block in sketches; but most importantly, it lets us wield some simple but very powerful shape principles in real time. Although it may seem basic, this is the stuff at the heart of what makes things look cool – mastery of these principles is the key to getting those elite, professional-looking results. Shape design is where pros are made!