Conceptualizing a Character

Table of Contents

  1. Collecting Inspirations
  2. Making It Your Own
    1. (Optional) Finding Artist Help
  3. (Alternative) Buying/Adopting a Character Design or Using a Pre-made Model

While ultimately, you want to your audience to stick around for your content and personality, your character design is your first impression and what helps draw new viewers in.

I think it is very important to have your character match not only your personality but also your content. That doesn’t mean your character design needs to be scream “gamer” or “comfy”. Instead, I think it’s important to consider what others may think your content would revolve around by looks alone and if the subversion of those expectations would drive them away.

While rebranding is technically easy to do, redebuting as a brand new character is pretty rare from what I’ve seen (minus when an indie VTuber joins a corporation and vice versa) and can be pricey.

Collecting Inspirations

To get started, I would recommend putting together a sort of vision board of some sort, collecting design elements you would want your character to have based on other things you’ve seen. This can be inspirations from other VTubers, anime characters, real life clothing, animals, etc. In the video above by Zekoz, he briefly goes over how this would look.

Making It Your Own

I recommend watching the video above by Squiiji on what makes a character design memorable for some general advice when trying to come up with a design.

Key Takeaways:

  1. Color Palette: If you have a primary color in mind, you can utilize tools like Adobe Color or Coolors (slight epilepsy warning on your first time using Coolers!) to find a color palette.
  2. Silhouette: Having a strong silhouette will allow people to identify your character more easily.
  3. Complexity & Clarity: The balance between being detailed enough to be interesting but not so busy that it’s distracting.
    1. Will your design hold up if someone is watching on their phone?
    2. Do the “marketable plush” test: Would you be able to chibify your character while still making sure they are recognizable?
  4. Focal Points: Since VTubers are often seen only from the waist-up, focus your details on those areas.
    1. The face (namely the eyes, eyebrows, and mouth) should be key focal points.
  5. Motifs: Repeating motifs will allow people to identify you more easily.
    1. How do you take something like an icon, design, or color design and transform it to make it your own and instantly recognizable?

(Optional) Finding Artist Help

For those less artistically-inclined, you can see if you can find an artist to help you flesh a character out. This will be covered in a later section about obtaining a model.

(Alternative) Buying/Adopting a Character Design or Using a Pre-made Model

If you want to get started as soon as possible, you can find “adoptable” character designs or pre-made model for sale.

For adoptables, you can find people posting them on Twitter using the following hashtags:

For pre-made models, refer to the obtaining a model section.