Creating Characters with Personality

By Tom Bancroft

Watson-Guptill, 2006

8½" x 11", 160 pages

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As far as I know, there are no other books on the subject of character design. There is another book titled "Digital Character Design and Painting" which is really about painting although there is a small section about character design per se at the beginning. "Creating Characters with Personality" is really about character design from cover to cover.

Tom Bancroft is a Disney animator who worked on several well known Disney feature animations. He really knows his craft and have a solid character development method that he explains in this book. His style of character design is unmistakenly Disneyesque. For instance, there is a short section at the end of the book where he presents us with different character styles such as "comic books", "TV or Web", "Manga", "CG", "Video games" and even though the characters depicted have characteristics of the described style, all of those characters seem to belong to the same world nevertheless. When I first browsed the book, I found that similarity in designs a little bit disturbing for a book about character design. On the surface, it looked like yet another "How to Draw ..." type of book. Fortunately, though, the text that acompany the illustrations is filled with design advices that go beyond style, are much more general and can be applied to whatever drawing style. And this is the true strength of this book.

One of the first section of the book is about "Character hierarchy", A concept linked to style where the design of a particular character is influenced by how he will be used in the animation, like lead character or supporting character, or secondary, or background. Then the next section covers the concept of shape, such as round, square, triangle, in character design, how it influence our perception of a character's personality and how the designer can use that to improve the character design. Then, there are some design help tools and approaches that are presented, like exploring different proportions and relative sizes and shapes. Or mixing different elements designs together to discover new unexpected but interesting designs. The section on animals covers the concept of realism vs anthropomorphism in animal designs.

The chapter about "ages" covers a difficult aspect of character designs. How to design a character that looks its age?. This section contains several tips on different ages characteristics that can be used when designing characters of different ages. In the next chapter, the author covers another difficult aspect of character design, that is how to design a cast of characters that all look like they belong to the same world, yet are distinct enough that the viewer have no difficulties distinguishing one from another. This is especially important when the cast of characters all have about the same age. This is followed with a chapter about personality and how to represent that with drawing rhythm and flow. And it ends with a chapter about color and how this hepl perceive the character's personality.

Every concept is well illustrated with design progressions. And to help the reader practice the theory, there is a set of exercises that run throughout the book where the reader is invited to design a cast of characters for a fictional wester animated film. At the end of every chapter, each newly learned concept is put to use in the cast design task.

Overall, a very good book of character design methods. A good reference to consult when stuck into a corner while designing a character. Just picking any one of the design exploration technique from this book should help get out of a design dead-end.