The Business: Character Design & Multiple Revenue Streams

Spanish artist Kukuruyo posted a Twitter thread today that authors should heed. The initial post is here. I collect it all below, and clean it up a bit, but the thread has visual references I won't repost here. Go there and see what he means.

After years of having people hire me to do covers or illustrations for their media projects, like games, comics, or most commonly Books, i have an advice to give to these creators: CHARACTER DESIGN IS IMPORTANT.

Most of the time when someone hires me for a drawing of those things, especially on books, it's clear they don't give any importance to how the characters look. In the worst cases they haven't even think how they look, in any way. Best cases they have some basic description.

But it's obvious they haven't given many thought to it, and they expect me to come up with some design on the spot. And I mean, I can, I think I'm particularly good at quickly coming up with designs, BUT, there's no comparison between a quick fix and CHARACTER DESIGN.

Did you know that a Pro company can charge you thousands of dollars for designing a Brand icon or a character? That's because a good design takes lots of time, research, sketches, re-dos and knowledge. To do a good design you have to research.

You need to know the setting of the character, how's the culture of the place, the culture of that character, how they usually dress, why they dress that way, is it based on some real life culture you have to research as well? what's the theme of the work? the character's theme?

Even the color palettes are dependent on themes, cultures, setting, or how you want to code them to be distinguishable. For example in my "The succubus is a shonen protagonist", Demons clothes will be coded Black and white, while devils will be coded Red-ish

In my main Monster girls comic, K'sara is coded Red; she's the protagonist and active; Europa is coded blue, she's the rival and she has a more cool personality. Do you notice a pattern here? Also Europa's family is designed in the same way as her, there's (the) motif.

In a same race, characters dress different according to their personalities, but they also share some details from their own culture, even if it's just a common "form" that their designs adopt, it's not random. You notice a connection.

Even the character poses are relevant to tell you about them, so good character design needs to know the character personality and quirks. You can understand character personalities with just silent drawings just because of how they pose or gesticulate.

Things are not just thrown at random. Many times even if they give me long descriptions, it's all random. Colors don't match at all and look very weird, the chars wear a lot of stuff that saturate the design but doesn't add anything of value. This is normal when it's not your job.

If (you) want a good character design; and good designs are more successful; you have to first hire someone to do the work and do a base design; then you can use that base to hire artists to do covers, illustrations, comics or whatever.

If you ask me to just come up with something, yeah, for a little more I can, and it may look decent at first glance, but I haven't researched, I don't even know the setting, so whatever I come up with it's gonna look random once you consume the work and don't see a connection.

My main Monster girls comic is more absurd humor with lots of Mythology creatures thrown in so the connections are not that strong, but on other works you can definitely see everything I've talked about earlier.

Explaining all of this to clients would take a lot of time and in most cases they don't even understand that they don't understand, and they insist on having their ideas to the last letter, as if they know better than, you know, the expert they're hiring XD.

So yeah if you're planing to work on something that will require several drawings and visuals are gonna be relevant, hire (a) character designer first, pay someone to put the work on researching your setting and characters and do a base design, then use that base for other artists.

Good advice. Writers can do most of this as they go about doing their work, as character design--in written form--is something they should be doing. Think of it as doing what would become the Wiki profile that inevitably arises for any successful work, because this is a business and there's more to being a successful writer than just the book writing thing.

As a bonus, The Business of Writing has a new video talking revenue streams. Neo-patronage may be the future, but the savvy will never rely on it alone.

Have no shame in taking the property that you create and exploiting it. Fannish merchandise (posters, apparel, etc.), tie-ins ("The Barsoom War College Encyclopedia of the Warships of Christendom", "Gabriela Robin: Live In Neo-Tokyo"), live events, and so on- whatever works for your business, do it.