How I Do It: Character Planning

An important part of the comic creation process is developing a set of characters from which your action, story, and dialogue can flow.  Rather than just put pencil to paper right away, it is often best to go through a character design phase, trying out a variety of poses and constructs to see which looks best and is easiest to duplicate multiple times.  It's also worthwhile to make sure your characters are expressive enough, because the more expressive they are, the easier it is to deliver punchlines and actions.

So, I am going to share a couple of my character planning images with you in order to give you a sense of the repetitive, but important phase of character planning.

Firstly, I wanted to update Mush's look for this new series, and so I spent a good deal of time planning out his new character shape, as well as some of his expressions.

Mushroom Man Character Planning

The other main character needed for Strip #1 was Birdbrain, who was also going to get a makeover for this new series.  So, featured on this second page is predominantly the character creation phase for Birdbrain.

Birdbrain Character Planning

So, there you have it.  Though there will be many more characters down the road, these were the two I will eventually need to complete Strip #1, which we can dive into a little bit further next week, now that this step is out of the way.