Requesting a small portion of help

[Joseph Kerr]

Hello, i'm in need of a bit of help. I'm helping my friend with a fantasy comic, but i'm having difficulty coming up with character concepts. Also, my style (If you can call it that :( ) is really rough and sketchy, i have a horrible time with doing clean lineart. On top of all this, i'm having trouble with anatomy, knee's dont look right, legs that should be coming forward as a character walks look stumpy, and so forth.

So i am pleading with someone, anyone who is readind this, help me. If you could set me in the right direaction with character concepts that would be excellent, i would be even more grateful if you could include different face posistions/gestures and anatomy movement. Of course, i'm only asking, noone has to do anything; I would be extremely grateful if someone did though.

Thanks.

[Joseph Kerr]

Alright, so perhaps it wasn't that small of a request. I dont care what you guys give me, anything would be helpful. How do you go about designing a characters outfit? How many times do you re-draw the same character? Any inspirations that help you with your work?

I apologize if i'm asking for much, if you just answered the questions i now just asked, that would be fine.

Thanks

[talmir]

Ok, I might not really be the correct one to answer this but I will help as I can.

When I design a character (or try to :P ) Then (depending on what scenario) I get myself an inspiration book. Classical armors always do the trick. Then I scribble away for a while as a warmup. I redraw for about four or five times. Starting with a basic functional armor. Then I think about in what situation he would be. If it would be a desert I would put maybe a air filter into the healmet. Cloth around his mouth, etc. If it would be classical I might add a spike here, a spike there. Just be carefull to keep it functional since you dont want to change the design in the middle of the drawing. Dont define the breasts on females. A mistake I often see. That would make no sense in armor since it would just open up the opertunity to cut one breast off. All angles should be such that they deflect blows away from body.if its robotic I try and keep it pretty simple, just the basic design. Get it up complete with pipes, gears and such (I like steampunk :P ) But first and foremost the character/thing should be easy to "read". The reader/viewer should not have to speculate on what this thing is or that. Unless of course you really want it that way...

Hmm.. Well. Bottomline. I try drawing the same character for a few times. Proportions are a mess for me too but designing a character involves a bit of thought. I have seen too many ill thought out characters that are highly cliché/complicated/borin/unreadable. A well thought out character is a good character.

Just a friendly advice at last. This is not a forum thread to be rushed. In three hours you would be lucky to get a reply. This is a dusty, rarely ventured into part of the forums. Dont rush things. Makes people less inclined to help most of the time.

Peace and I hope it helped.

[Joseph Kerr]

Thanks Talmir, that helped, especially the part about thinking over the situation. If i can get up some of my art...would you mind looking it over? I would love any and all suggestions.

If anyone else has any thoughts or advice or anything like that, please do post. Though, i dont want people to feel like i'm pushing them to do something..so if i'm a little pushy, sorry.

Thanks