| Age | Properly illustrating
a character's age is often difficult until you familiarize yourself with
what happens to a certain feature after an extended amount of time. The
only really good way to learn this is by looking at "back then"
and "now" photos of your grandparents and their friends. - Most wrinkles are not made of lines; they are made of folds. Keep their 3-D nature in mind. - The more lines and folds you have, the older a character looks - Thinning/balding hair, liver spots, and missing teeth can make your point pretty quickly. - Old people tend to be shorter, and because of chronic pain or weakness, their posture is often stooped. |
| Ethnicity | It is pretty
difficult to make generalizations about a race unless it is one you made
up, and of the false generalizations, you probably know them as well as
I do. These tips are just a few observations based on mistakes I often see
people make. - Asian eyes differ vastly in shape; they are not always just almond-shaped like people usually draw them! But one thing most have in common is the way the skin curves over the inner corner. - Chinese people often have freckles. Just because someone is not white does not mean their skin is completely blank and filled with a single color. ;) - When you draw pale people, keep in mind that "lightness" and "color" are very different things. Asian people are often cartooned as being yellow, and it has at least a basis in truth. Even a very pale Japanese person is going to have a yellow/brown tint to their paleness when compared to the pinkish hue of a Celtic or Nordic person. - Even very dark black people can have lighter palms/soles to their feet. - All black people do not have a flat, broad nose and really big lips. Trust me ;) As you can see, in that image they both have almost the exact same nose and the same size of lips. You can be just as creative applying shapes to the faces of a black character as you can with a white one; when you finish and you are refining features, you can always tweak it to make it look more ethnically suggestive. |
| Attitude | Your character's
customary facial expression is affected by attitude, but so are the lines
on their face. - Bitter or grumpy characters will scowl a lot, leaving lines in the area where their eyebrows meet the top of their nose. - People who laugh a lot get a little feathering of wrinkles out from the corner of their eyes. (This is commonly called "crow's feet," which you can also get from squinting a lot--like people who are often outside in the sun and wind.) - Deep lines connecting the corners of the mouth to the edges of the nostrils can make your character look severe. People who bare their teeth a lot (or smoke!) often get these lines. This trait is also often coupled with being fat, since the lines can come from the larger, rounded cheeks; you need to remember to add in the extra weight if you want that effect. |
| Scars | Scars are
not just made when a wound is inflicted--they only occur if the wound damages
tissue. The placement on the body, severity of the wound, and method
of damage govern how the scar will look. - If the wound is a cut, as from a knife or sword, generally it will be wider in the middle and taper to a point at the edges. If the weapon is blunt, the edges of the wound and therefore the scar will usually ripple more. - Scars caused from the claws of a wild animal start out thinner on one end and generally get wider (and deeper) as the animal pulls its paw back toward itself. - Whip marks depend entirely on the implement used for the flogging. I advise you look up information on a particular punishment if you want accurate information about the scars. For an example, however, the cat-o'-nine-tails commonly used on sailors in the Royal Navy (circa early 1700's) had nine thin lengths of rope with a tiny knot on the end of each--so scars from such an implement will be heavier at one end, and tend to cross each other in bunches. - Burn scars are difficult because there are so many different types. One thing is for certain though: your skin melts if it is burned to the point where it will leave a scar. This can either leave your skin unnaturally smooth, as if it had been ironed, or ropey and twisted because it was moved while it was melted and then cooled off in lumps. (Yeah, gross, I know.) The color of scars depends on how old they are, genetics, and how they were treated while they were forming. - Scars that have just lost their scabs generally start out an angry red, and are often shiny in places, especially if the cause was a burn. Over time, some scars become smaller because the body heals outlying smaller portions of the wound. - My scars are white, but I have known people with similar wounds whose scars went pink or brown. |