Basic Art Requirements You Need When Creating Your Animated Characters

The process of creating an animated movie have evolved through the decades. But interestingly, the basic essentials needed to effectively implement a project's animation workflow still remain the same. Even the basic art requirements in creating animated characters have never completely changed through the years.

Concept Artworks

From rough sketches to full-blown concept artworks, these documents work like visual representations of the concept and theme of the movie. They serve as visual brainstorm ideas as the members of the production team discuss the creative, technical, and financial needs of the project. These concept artworks feature ranges of sketches and drawings of the intended look for the movie's backgrounds, sets, and props and the preconceived appearances of the movie's characters.

Character Design

A character design provides the final look of the character after making initial sketches and concept artworks. It includes the colors and textures of the face, hair, and body, along with the costumes, accessories, and other important details that should be seen on the character. This document must clearly show the character's physicality and personality. It usually features the character's trademark pose for the film. There are also times that it simply features the character in a simple standing position.

When creating an animated character, there should be a rightful balance between the amount of details you should and should not include. The more details you have in your character design, the more demanding the work becomes because of the time, effort, and resources involved in making all these details move during the animation process. However, a character design that lacks details look dull and uninteresting.

Character Turnaround

The character turnaround, also called a character model sheet, character board, character rotation, character sheet, character study, or simply a study, is a very important document used in animation work. It allows the artists to accurately visualize the character's front, back, sides, and other significant angles in between them. It helps standardize the appearance, gestures, poses, and proportions of the character for continuity purposes. In doing so, the animation looks consistent from start to end.

Character Expression Sheet

Unlike in real actors where an actual person bases his or her performance on his or her acting skills, the actions of a specific animated character is based on an artist or a group of artists' drawing, animation, and storytelling skills. The character expression sheet features comparative studies of how the character looks in different levels or variations of emotional expressions. This document helps in making a more detailed and consistent acting range for the different emotions a character feels in the movie.

Character March, Run, and Flight Cycles

A character march or run cycle is generally used for characters with legs. If a character can fly, a character flight cycle is also made. These documents collect the walk, march, run, and flight cycles of a character to serve as references for the animators during the film's production stage. Each document features a series of drawings of the same character in a single sheet where the poses reflect an action progression at specific cycles or intervals.

Character Design Comparison Sheet

A character design comparison sheet contains a number of significant characters that will interact together in the movie. The character designs can be used to create a single document that features the different characters and how they physically compare with one another in terms of height, body size, and other visual attributes. This document helps artists in maintaining the right size and proportion of characters when they are shown together in a scene.

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