Reply To: JR’s Characters

[JR19759]

@Nighthawk- It’s just a case of experimenting. You can have a lot of variety using in individual face part sets. For example, eyes. There are, when you think about it, three ways to use each pair of eyes. You’ve got using both eyes together, but then you could just use the right eye and flip it so you have a pair of eyes, same goes for the left eye. It’s surprising how different a face looks with just those variations.

Also, don’t be afraid to use the full faces in the heads category as parts. A lot of my characters use individual parts from the faces and replace everything else with items from the other face categories (e.g. Amazon has the eyebrows and eyes from the last face on the heads-femalefaces page, but I replaced thenose and mouth. With Paragon, I used the wrinkled forehead and the nose from the second face in heads-maleface. And with Lili, I only used the nose from the third face on the second row of heads-femaleface).

It’s also worth thinking about positioning. Generally, the eyes should be half way down the head, with the top of the ears lining up with the eyebrows. But you can definately play around with the positioning of the mouth in relation to the nose to give more expression and you can move the etire face further up the head to give the impression of a long chin, provided you also move the hair up to compensate.

Finally, think about eyebrows. They say a lot. Where they are positioned in relation to the eyes and how much they are rotated makes the difference between a character being happy, sad or angry and it can really change how you character feels to the audience. For example, if you look at my Zodiac series, the only thing I purposefully changed on every character between their human and spirit forms was the eyebrow position, the rotated slightly and moved down, to make them look angrier and more ready for action.

But that’s just how I do it anyway. I don’t tend to shade any of my characters any more so if you’re looking for advice on how to shade faces then you’d probably want to ask AMS, djuby or headlessgeneral, they’d be much better than me at giving advice on how to do it well. TBH they would probably be better at giving advice on how to do faces well, since they all do better faces than me anyway.