Bringing Characters to Life: Vibrant Colors and Personalities in Our Visual Novel Character Cast
Say hello to the demo cast for LO:AD! From left to right, we have Wyren (main character), Wyren’s Dad, Wyren’s Mom, NPC Villager, Cos Ner (Shopkeeper), The Mill Attendant, Osbert, Young Boy, Runa and Syuong.
Wyren is an 8 year old boy that lives in the village of Sacrament Village with his dad and mom. There are other villagers that request chores to be done for currency. Osbert, the seventh character from the left, is quirky as you have read in our previous post. Runa and Syuong, the last two characters who are more mysterious.
The Power of Colors in Character Design
Colors are important in portraying emotions, personalities and themes in visual storytelling. The blue color of Wyren’s hair was a somewhat popular choice based on Japanese anime. Often times these creators will use blue or purple shades to portray black hair to make it more interesting. Blue is also a color that is associated with trust. Often times banks will use blue for their logos to convey this theme.
The clothing and skin color for each of the characters was chosen based on their backgrounds and location in their environments. Sacrament Village is a post apocalyptic village that has been functioning for around 300 years now. There are a variety of ethnic backgrounds based on the people that settled there. As for their clothing, the colors were chosen based on natural dies that could be found in and around the desert.
Behind-the-Scenes Coloring Process
After outlining the character cast, I moved on to filling in the colors and shading them. I started by filling in every character first using the line art layer as a reference and the fill tool. After this was done for all characters, I individually went to each character and used the shading assist tool in Clip Studio Paint for shadowing. I played with the light source and made it relevant for any scene setting and to each character. Then I had to clean up the layers from the shading assist because sometimes the screen layers bleed outside your line art. After that, I chose layers to add a blue multiplying layer and a yellow add (glow) layer to give it a vintage Tetsuya Nomura Final Fantasy character concept look. After that, each character was saved individually to their prospective folders.
Emphasizing Unique Qualities
When choosing hair styles, color, attire and demeanor, it is important to convey attitude and personality when working with 2D character art. We know that stiff and uninteresting characters can deter players at times and a lot of care and detail was taken into consideration for all of our characters (even the NPCs).
Wyren’s dad for example, he has a low pony-tail and somewhat messy layered cut. This is portray he was on the wilder side as a child and has grown into his middle age still holding onto those values. His standing pose evokes the impression he has, “been there and done that” but now wants to support his son Wyren the same way that he grew up. His arms crossed and leaning his weight on one foot gives him a somewhat carefree attitude. As for Wyren’s mom, you can see she is a bit the opposite. She has short hair because she is busy, her hand is on her hip to convey her authority and confidence as a person and her cheerful demeanor can shift instantly if she is disrespected.
Although most players will not come to these conclusions consciously in their thoughts, these details are more sub-conscious social constructs our society has shown us through different media over the last 100 years.
In conclusion, creating character art for our visual novel has been a success and the processes I have learned from doing it will carry into any future character creations that are needed for the project. Now that you are aware of these processes, be on the look out for character appearances conveying emotions, personality or themes based on color, standing poses and other nuances.