Ref CH 01 · Characters Funny cartoon character design tips

Technique Edition of 20/08/2026 also filed under: shape language, model sheets

Character design: a drawing solved for three demands at once, reading at a glance, being redrawn without drifting, and carrying a joke in its stance before anyone has spoken.

In short

If the silhouette does not read, nothing else you do will fix it.
Contrast of shapes beats variety of shapes.
Design the flaw. A character who wants nothing is not funny, only decorated.

1. What a design has to survive

A character in a strip, a series or a game is not drawn once. It is drawn hundreds of times, often by other hands, at sizes from a poster to a favicon, in poses the designer never imagined. Every decision that makes the first drawing impressive but the hundredth drawing difficult is a decision that will be quietly removed by whoever inherits the character. Design for the hundredth drawing.

2. The silhouette test

Fill the drawing solid black and look at it. If you cannot tell who it is, what they are doing, or which way they face, the design is not finished. The test is brutal because it removes everything you have been leaning on: line weight, colour, expression, texture.

Run it twice: once on the character standing neutral, and once on a pose in the middle of an action. A design can pass the first and fail the second, which is exactly the design that will frustrate an animator later.

3. Shape language

Audiences read basic shapes before they read anything else, and cartooning has leaned on that for a century. The associations are conventions rather than laws, and they are strongest when a design commits to one and contrasts it against another.

Conventions, what they carry, and what to watch for
Base shape	Commonly reads as	Useful for	Risk
Circle	Friendly, harmless, young	Comic leads, sidekicks, mascots	Blandness if nothing contrasts it
Square	Solid, dependable, stubborn	Strong types, authority, heavies	Stiffness and dull silhouettes
Triangle	Sharp, unstable, dangerous	Villains, schemers, live wires	Reads as evil even when you did not mean it
Tall rectangle	Formal, aloof, brittle	Bureaucrats, snobs, tall comic foils	Hard to pose without looking rigid
Pear	Grounded, comic, worn down	Long suffering adults	Overused as lazy shorthand
Mixed with one dominant	A specific individual	Almost every good design	Losing the dominant shape entirely

Wide table: scroll it sideways.

Two working rules. First, one dominant shape per character, with the other shapes as accents, otherwise the design reads as noise. Second, contrast the character against the cast: a round character standing next to a tall angular one is funnier than either alone, and a whole cast of the same shape is a crowd, not an ensemble.

4. Proportion as a dial

Head count, the number of head heights in the whole figure, is the fastest tonal control in character design. Fewer head heights reads younger, cuter and more comic; more head heights reads older, more heroic and more serious. Change nothing else in a design and move the head count, and the genre moves with it.

Then push one feature past the others. Comedy lives in exaggeration that is specific: the hands of a character whose job is hands, the jaw of a character who talks too much, the feet of a character who cannot stop moving. Exaggerating everything equally is the same as exaggerating nothing.

5. Where the comedy lives

The flaw is the engine. A want plus an obstacle, both visible in the design: the small character with the big ambition, the fastidious one covered in dust.
Asymmetry. A perfectly symmetrical character is a logo. One raised eyebrow, one bent ear, one shorter sleeve gives the drawing a personality before it moves.
One memorable object. A hat, a clipboard, a bandage. It gives the audience a handle and gives you a prop to play with.
Stance before face. The way a character stands says more than its expression, and it survives being drawn small.
Dignity under pressure. The oldest comic engine there is: a character who takes itself seriously while the drawing does not.

6. Keeping it consistent

The deliverable for a character is not a picture. It is a small set of documents that let anyone draw it:

Turnaround: front, three quarter, side and back, on the same eye lines.
Expression sheet: six to ten expressions including the extremes, because the extremes define the range.
Size comparison: the cast lined up together, so relative scale never drifts.
Colour key: the palette, plus a version desaturated to check that the values separate without colour.
Construction notes: the shapes underneath, so a redraw starts from the same skeleton.

Then draw the character twenty times, quickly, from the sheet. Anything that degrades under speed is too complicated and should be simplified now rather than by a stranger later.

Character model sheet for a comic figure: four turnaround views on shared eye lines, a row of six expressions, a size comparison with two other characters, and the same figure filled solid black as a silhouette test — The delivery for a character: turnaround, expressions, scale, and the silhouette that proves it reads.

7. Appeal, honestly defined

Appeal is a word that gets used as if it meant cuteness. It does not. In practice a design has appeal when it is clear at a glance, when its shapes have rhythm rather than repetition, when it is asymmetric enough to feel alive, and when it looks like it could move. Villains, monsters and thoroughly unpleasant characters have appeal in exactly this sense, which is why the word survives.