Whether you’re looking to give stronger personality to your characters, or perhaps make your environments more atmospheric, applying design principles to your compositions is a tried and tested way to make them stronger. Not only that, there are many design-related exercises you can try that will hone your skills and train your eye.
When designing characters, the advice from illustrator and character artist Nika Lemut is to identify their defining features and then emphasise them strongly. “When in doubt, try to think of it like you’re playing around with the sliders in the character creator section of a video game,” she says. “Move or resize some features to see what kind of feeling they evoke. Grab the brows and push them downwards, or select the nose and try making it wider.”
Keep tinkering until you feel you’ve captured a character’s essence. “This has been a great method for me, as it helps me see when I haven’t
