Character Design, Art, and What You Make Of It

I’m not very good at drawing. I never have been. Especially not things that actually exist, like… people, or objects.

I’m not terrible, but I’m not great, and this is probably exacerbated by the fact that I don’t really practice much. My artistic brain has always been channelled either into writing or physically making stuff. I can write one hell of a character description (he says, adjusting the valves of his own trumpet), but realising it in a visual form? Help me. Please.

The spark for rambling about this was looking through my old sketchbook, which despite the fact that I must have had it for a decade or so now is exactly 1/3 full. I really thought I’d drawn more in it, I’ll be honest. I take solace in the fact that I do have a bit of digital art lying around – I had/have an app called Paper on my iPad which I played around with a lot at university. I leave that solace behind when I look at how not-particularly-good those digital drawings are, either.

I’ve decided to try and get better at drawing several times but every time, I pick up a pencil for a few days, maybe a week or two, and then bounce off it. As a result, I’ve never gotten much better. It’s almost like continuous practice – like, say, writing 500 words every single day for almost a decade – lets you get better at doing something!

But my brain doesn’t quite click with visual art – at least not this kind. What I can do, decently well, is build and paint miniatures. That, I enjoy; that I also practice, and that I have slowly improved at over time, for all that I’m guilty of not pushing myself to try new techniques often enough to actually get better at the painting. But I like making little guys. I like kitbashing them to give personality; trinkets here, scopes and weird equipment there, to imply specialist roles and bring them to life a little more.

(To a lesser extent, LEGO fills this niche: I like to just build little things from my imagination sometimes, just let designs come together from the bricks. But mostly I do sets these days.)

What I’m doing, I realised (again) the other day, as I posed another Space Marine kill-team, is character design. I’m doing what more talented people do with pencil and paper, what I normally have to do with words and my mind’s eye alone. Because I can imagine these people perfectly: Tal Wenlock, Alexander Dio, Perce, the farmers of Quern. I know what they look like in my head. I just can’t render that as an image. I have to let my words do the work for me. Because, as this drawing I found in my sketchbook from around 2016 proves, of what appears to be some sort of prototype Tal Wenlock, my art certainly ain’t doing the trick.

He’s not bad. He’s just not very good.

Sometimes, miniatures can do the work for me: my DnD characters have been rendered in physical form well enough, but with my current bitz box that only really works for either swords-and-sorcery folk like Sir Geoffrey or the denizens of the grim darkness of the far future. If a character doesn’t have the capacity for extreme violence then unfortunately I haven’t got the parts to build them.

So it’s words for me. The only physical versions of most of my characters are how my words describe them. And you may have noticed, as I have, that I don’t often actually give a full physical description of a character. I don’t like to specify hair or skin colour or facial features. I prefer the more abstract things: height, build, expression; maybe a key feature like Barty Rubin’s gold teeth. I want you to get the feel of these characters in your own mind rather than being pinned to a precise version from mine.

(The one real exception to this is Gideon the Effervescent, who looks exactly like his appearance on The Fire Within’ s cover, because he just leapt so vividly into my mind that he had to be just so.)

Because ultimately I want you to imagine them how you want, in specific terms. In my head, Tal Wenlock looks a lot like me. So does Alexander Dio; so does Tom the farmer. Because I’m writing from their perspectives, I’m putting myself in their shoes – but when you read these stories I want you to do the same. So much of my childhood (and current) escapism is rooted in putting myself in these stories, in identifying with these characters I love so strongly. I want my readers to be able to do the same. I don’t want anyone to feel like they couldn’t be Max Odyn because they don’t look like her. I don’t want anyone to feel like they couldn’t draw or realise their own interpretation of Dio in his armour. I don’t want anyone to feel locked out of the adventure because they don’t look right.

Art is subjective. There’s room for so many interpretations of what I’ve written and what I’m writing. I want to leave that space for all of them. Including, maybe, mine, if I can persuade myself to pick up a pencil properly again. There are versions of these characters in my mind that I might set down in visual form. But they’ll only ever be versions. The words are the only canon, and even that’s up for interpretation.

…I guess what I’m saying is, I need to do more drawing, but if you want to do it to, please do. I’d love to see it.