| One thing you will notice as time goes on is that some of your drawings of people and animals start to take on a personality. You start thinking about their emotions and motivations. Before you know it you have the beginnings of a character. Keep thinking about your character each time you draw them. What do they like to eat? Is he or she timid or adventurous? What makes them cry? You'll find that each character is a part of you in some way.
My characters for "The Fourth Power" started as loose sketches in my notebook. I was trying different hairstyles on them and even different clothes. When I started really thinking about each character I noticed that I was taking small parts of me and giving them to the characters. Now I can't help but thinking of them like they are my children. I love them and think about them often. This fuels my motivation to keep going on the project because I want to see how it turns out. So you have some characters now. What now??? Go and buy a sketch book for each character. This will end up being a good reference down the road. Label the cover and spine with the name of the character. I number my books as well. Reserve the first couple of pages for hand written notes about the character. Things like their full name, birthday, height, hair color, favorite foods, etc. You can fill in the blanks as you go. Now go past those pages and freehand in the one sketch from your old sketch book that defines the character for you. You can freehand them all but it's more fun to make new sketches based on the one you transfered.
For each character spend a few minutes a week drawing new pictures of them. Over time they will look better and more refined. About now you might even have some kind of short story in mind about your characters. I "grow" my characters and stories by thinking about how they would react in certain situations. Just little one minute situations. Maybe they just heard a joke or one them has a crush on someone and runs into that person. Write them down. Either in your sketch book or better yet in a notebook that will be the blueprint for your story. Over a few weeks you will have a bunch of random little stories or scenes. Your brain is always thinking about this stuff, even when you sleep. At some point you will be linking these scenes together and thinking of even more scenes and characters. Before you know it you will have an idea for an entire story! Your characters are coming to life! |
