How to Find/Draw Character Art For Your Cast of Characters

As many of you may already know, I am a little bit of an artist, and I'm also highly visually oriented, so having character art for my characters really helps me visualize them.

In editing my current duology, I realized I had little more than some mild descriptions of my characters, and I couldn't really visualize any of them really well until book 2. That wasn't going to cut it. So I now have a Pinterest board full of reference pictures and a slowly growing collection of hand-drawn character art in my desk.

If you're anything like me, you really need to see your characters in order to write them correctly. And whether you can draw or whether you can't, this post will definitely help you with that. So here we go!

How to Find Character Art

My top tip for finding character art? Pinterest! On Pinterest you can search the bare essentials of the picture you need(for example, 'Fantasy girl blonde'), and you will get a wide array of options. Keep digging around until you find what you're looking for, or change the search if you're not having any luck.

Just look at this variety!

Other places you could try:

• Basic Google search.
• Deviantart- art drawn by artists across the web! All the best stuff comes from here!
• Search #characterart on any platform. Good stuff will always come up.

Or, if you really want something personalized for you, you could always commission someone to draw your vision of your character! This will obviously cost money, but it could be cool to have a keepsake.


How to Draw Character Art

Still so proud of this one.

If you're already really good at art, you might not need to hear this. But if you are seeking to improve your skills at drawing your characters like I am, I would highly suggest using reference pictures to draw your art. Find something that looks like your character(like we did above), and use it as a reference to draw your character. Study the linework, notice how the highlights and shadows are placed, and try to copy them. I used reference pictures for both of these, and they turned out great!

You don't even have to find something that looks exactly like what you're looking for. You can use two or more pictures if you need! Use the face from one, the clothes from another, and the hair from still another. Make it your own! Just make sure they blend together well.

And don't be hard on yourself if your art doesn't come out perfectly. You can always try again! Not only will doing it again help you improve your art skills, but it will also help you hone your vision of your character. Over the years, my character art has gotten better and better, and the use of reference pictures is really helping me improve my skillz.

One last idea

If you like, you could even take a piece of existing art or a photograph and Photoshop it to match your vision. I've done this with a few projects. Today's photo editing programs are truly amazing, and you can tweak almost anything to your will with enough effort.

That's it for today! Have you ever done any character art, or are you more of a Pinterest person? Tell me in the comments, and I promise to respond!