Failing Creatively: The thing I should do, but don’t

PSA: Get your character sheets in order people!!!

The thing I have always failed miserably at is consistency. And let’s get real, if you want a character to take hold in this world and be memorable, then you need to be able to draw it the same every time you work on something with that character. So let’s take a minute to talk about the one thing a self-taught sketchbook artist never really lets sink in. (And it wasn’t for lack of information on the topic; I just apparently really put it into practice even though I knew I should 🤦‍♀️) That’s right, people, we are talking about character design and character sheets.

When I think back on all the art books and classes I have taken over the years, everyone always says it: Get your characters in order; it is key to consistency. Character designers post their amazing character sheets all the time, and I can’t think of any real artists who don’t work out the looks of their characters at every angle. You need to work out how your illustrations work and move if you want them to make sense in the world you’re building for them.

Gigi

After years of drawing Gigi, the example of this article, I realized that every time I picked up a pencil or stylus to create her, the spots would move, the head shape would change, and the eyes would be slightly off. If you want your characters to have the memorability of a Garfield or Calvin and Hobbs, they can’t look different every time you draw them.

Yet mine always were because when I started drawing Gigi, she was just a little creation for my youngest kid’s entertainment. I would make the character for a prompt or two, but since it was mostly just for the kiddo at first, I didn’t really feel the need to build out how the look would be. It didn’t matter to my 4-year-old if the spots moved or the head changed, so why should it matter to me?

Balloon

Map

Then COVID hit and I pivoted into trying to work more in illustration, and I thought Gigi would be a good main character. So I developed a friend, Lulu, who was also wildly inconsistent but less so, and started sporadically working on short comics for them. Yet as I kept working out the characters’ stories, I also found the glaring changes from comic to comic more pronounced.

Did I stop and reassess whether or not I needed to really sit down and develop a consistent look? Did I think about all the body angles and head angles? Did I even think about different moods? Absolutely not. I am an artist. I can wing it. The consistency will come with drawing Gigi again and again. This is obviously the wrong answer. You can see it in my Inktober illustrations over the years. Gigi and Lulu are rarely consistent and have evolved a lot over that time.

Chances are there will not be a lot of Gigi and Lulu while I do this, but I am going to try and get back to illustrating the good news with a little one-panel comic for the stories, à la New Yorker style possibly. Once I work all the logistics of Gigi and Lulu out, so that the characters are ready and will be consistent (cough looking 👀 at you, Gigi). They will really start to be more regular web comics about them, and I intend to feature them in my good news art more often.

So now I ask, did you ever skip a step you know you should be including in your art process? I am curious to hear about everyone’s workarounds.

Till next time, keep failing creatively, and see you next week with some good news.

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