My Lack of Personality was Holding Me Back!

I started drawing because I wanted to create stories, scenes and characters that felt alive. I doubt I’m the only one. And while I’ve managed to reach a point where I’m fairly happy about developing characters visually, they still feel lifeless and shallow to me, and for the longest time I didn’t know why that was.

I’ve tried studying and experimenting with gesture, figure drawing, line of action, rhythms, force and even acting, but while the drawings got better, the sense of life remained elusively absent. But I think I’ve finally figured out why that was. They had no personality.

How I got by without a personality

On those rare occasions where I created a character specifically, instead of just random doodling, I would usually follow this pattern.

    1.       Pick a generic idea – witch, pirate, professor, etc.

    2.       Research or just start designing – focusing on design principles like shape, proportion, etc.

    3.       Finalize sketch, ink and color

Not a terrible process but very inefficient, for me anyway. There was way too much guessing involved and no real goal in mind.

Show me your personality

I should take a moment to address the difference between showing personality and having personality. I know it doesn’t seem like there would be a distinction, but there is. A lot of character design advice you come across talks about working personality into your design, and how personality should affect the design process. But that advice always assumes you have a personality set out for the character ahead of time. I never did. So when I say my characters needed personality, I’m not talking about showing it, I’m talking about having one. An example might help explain the difference.

Ex. A teenage girl has her hair up, held by a bright pink fluffy scrunchy.

If you were to draw this, the inclusion of the scrunchy and the fact that her hair is up shows the character’s personality. But it is the reasons why she wears them that tell us she actually has a personality. So if I was to say she wears a fluffy pink scrunchy because she’s sporty, likes pink and has a bubbly demeanor, then that is her actual personality. The fact that she wears them, is just about showing this.

Why do I even need a personality?

Well, you don’t need it, but it seems to help tremendously, particularly if you want your characters to live. Here’s why.

It’s all about choices. What we choose, says something about our personality. The clothes you wear, the food you eat, the books you read, the way you walk, all of it says something about who you are. In the same way, what you choose for your characters says something about their personality. But without defining what that personality is ahead of time, your choices are going to be a little unpredictable. You have no road map. You would basically just be throwing elements into a blender until you were happy with the results.

Now for some people, and some situations, that’s fine. You can end up with some very impressive designs that way. And if you are happy with that process and the results it produces, that’s great. I’m not, so I’m going to keep exploring the significance of personality in character design.

How do I use my personality?

To demonstrate the usefulness of a predefined personality, as well as how easy it is to develop one for even a quick throwaway character, I’ll use a witch as an example.

I think the first thing many people do when deliberately designing a character is to start asking some questions.

    Is she going to be short or tall? Is she a good witch or bad? Is she an old witch or young? What kind of clothes might she wear?

Pretty standard visual based questions that you would have to answer before the design was finished. You might not ask them explicitly, but at some level you will have had to come up with an answer either before or as you were drawing. And at this stage, you could probably get away with not having a personality set out and still manage to answer these questions. However, you would still be guessing at the answers, as previously mentioned, and you would also start to struggle, or at least I did, when faced with posing the character. Without a personality, the following questions are more difficult to answer.

    How does she hold herself/stand? Does she slouch? Does she smile a lot, or frown? Does she scowl at people? Does she have a broom and if so, how does she normally hold it?

Admittedly, you don’t always have to answer these sorts of question, but if you do, without a personality, you are once again guessing at it, and in a lot of instances, you might need to draw a lot of different variations before you arrived at something that appealed to you.

So how do you use a personality? Here’s how I’ve been doing it.

Pick 3 character traits. I like to go with 2 positive or neutral traits, like ambitious or sweet or brave, and 1 flaw, like short tempered or closed off. You can find lists of these types of traits all over the net, writers use them all the time. Don’t feel like you need to strictly stick to 3 traits, either. For a throwaway character you probably don’t want to spend too much time on developing a complex personality, but for characters you want to use more than once, feel free to add more. And keep in mind, the more you use that character, the more likely they are to evolve, so keep an open mind.

So for the witch, let’s go with a hot headed woman who flies off the handle at the slightest provocation (First Trait). Cats follow her around wherever she goes and she doesn’t like it (Second Trait). And despite her best efforts, she is currently unable to cast a single spell (Flaw).

The reason I normally add a flaw, is if you want to create a story with that character, all you need to do is add a goal, usually something that works against the flaw, and you basically have a story. Simple. So if I said she wanted to curse the local baker, her flaw would make that difficult. How she overcame that would be the basic plot for the story.

So how does this help me design the character, well let’s have a go. Keep in mind, now that we’ve developed a personality, it is now about showing it. If she has a short temper, we might decide to make her a short character, or she could be skinny like a fuse. You could incorporate a fire motif into her design, or just introduce a lot of organic triangles, to indicate danger. Instead of going for the stereotypical black dress, you could go with red or orange. As for posing and actions, a personality makes these questions much easier too. She could be quite hunched up, or she might swing her arms around wildly. She might even carry her broom around so she could hit people with it, or to swing at the cats who keep following her.

A helpful personality

Hopefully you can see just how useful a personality is to the creation of a character. It provides a road map to the choices you will need to make about how the character might look as well as how it might act and behave. Which, at least for me, has made the process a whole lot easier and heaps more fun. Also, and this really surprised me, but as soon as I had a simple personality developed, I started to see the character in my head, and not just standing there either. I could put them in all sorts of different scenarios and their personality determined how they would act. That has almost never happened to me before, and it’s one of the reasons I was so excited about this development. I would really like to know if anyone else who gives this process a go, experiences a similar occurrence.

So that’s it. A hugely simple concept that I completely missed for the longest time, because I’m slow, and is probably abundantly obvious to everyone else, but I just had to share my take on the whole thing. If it helps someone else, that’s great. If not, it still helped me immeasurably.

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Okay, so here is Version 2. I have tried to possibly simplify and take control of the rambling a little. Hopefully it's a little more concise, although "concise" has never been one of my strong points. Still quite a wall of text but if I poke out anymore bricks it'll probably come down. But let me know anyway. If I need to take another run at it to make it more comprehensible, I will.
And as I mentioned in the last version, I would still love to hear your thoughts on the topic, so please leave a comment. Do you do something similar to this, or do you just let the personality develop as you design? Do you struggle with a sense of lifeless in your characters or is it just me? Let me know.

And this probably goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, this has basically been my take on personality in the character design. It is based on my understanding and is subject to my own personal thoughts and opinions. So by all means, don't take it as a rule or truth or "the right way". I have struggled with this aspect of the design process for years and I have finally found something that works for me. I have only shared it in the hopes that it might help someone else, or to start a conversation about how other people might deal with the topic. If you disagree with me, that's great. As long as you method works for you, stick with it. I just needed to find one that worked for me, and this is it.