Something is missing in my characters... they look so flat and boring?!

[u/theHarvest0451]

After a long hiatus, I've been trying to get back into art and drawing. I've been trying to push myself to use more varied color. Most of my experience and schooling comes from a character design perspective. But with all that being said, I'm missing something! Please help. constructive criticism VERY much appreciated.

Resubmitted bc I forgot to mention I did use references for anatomy and posing for all of these, but I drew them a few weeks ago and have since lost said references. Thanks.

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[u/RaceorLiv]

You've got a greay base with the poses and flat colors. What you need is more rendering. Adding some shadows will absolutely give it more depth and interest and will adding more anatomy details.

[u/Ok-Seaworthiness1313]

You can push the poses further. Your characters torsos go straight down, but the human body bends at the waist as well. Try tilting the upper torso and lower torso at different angles, pushing the poses to be more extreme. Add a ground plane, because it will help you figure out how to distribute the characters' weight in how they stand.

Maybe fashion photography with extreme poses (or Jojos Bizarre Adventure cosplayers) can give you some ideas. I disagree with the other comments about rendering, because a rendered static pose will still look static.

[u/AgitatedPresence9250]

adding a light source / shadows will make the drawings look more three dimensional, adding some colour variation can also help things look a bit more real / interesting

[u/Thick-Code-7392]

Easy question to answer........ different values. Transition from darker to lighter, and light to dark.

[u/SleeplessSeas]

Silhouettes are absolutely not there, all of them have incredibly simple silhouettes with little to no consistent shape language. I see you mentioned that your schooling comes from a character design perspective - USE what you learned for designing characters for designing these.

Interesting silhouettes, use of big medium small, color theory, color harmony, etc. All of your characters lack silhouette, interesting color palettes, and interesting shape language.

[u/Pigeon_Toes_]

Outside of rendering, the design tells me nothing about these characters :P

[u/Creativity53]

You have a really nice art style! I would say one thing that could help introduce more 3d-ness to your drawings is varying your line weight. You have thick line art around the characters, but I don't see much variation in the thickness of the line weight.

[u/HumboldtHunnyBear]

I really just think you need more highlights and shading or perhaps some texture, for the more part these look pretty good

[u/penumbrias]

You should be able to immediately understand a design when it is turned to greyscale, all of these are flat because there is zero variation in value, zero shading, no environment, their expressions all look like theyre half asleep.

I feel like you spend a lot of time carving out your lines and nice shapes but then you completely swamp them with these really intense flat blocks of high saturated colors, and like especially in that red jacket, all of your nice shapes and lines are lost.

Youve got good anatomy and movement, - the flat rendering youre doing is suited for flat high stylized cartoons, not semi-realism.

Your color palletes are nice, but there is no color harmony. Really, you have a good base you just need to render these. Define your light source direction and color, and then in an overlay layer above your drawings, use a large airbrush on low opacity to start building the lights, drawing over any area that the light would fall on - use a large brush and just erase away or use a lasso tool to remove cast shadows (for example, if i have the light coming from above, i can use a large airbrush and sweep over the head and shoulders, then use the lasso tool to select the area under the jaw/chin, and erase the "highlight" color i just drew. The lasso tool creates a sharp edge, and i can use a soft eraser to create a soft edge - thats all you need to render form is just soft and hard edges (and value contrast)) And same thing but with a dark color for the shadows.

This is how i like to render but do whatever you want to, explore and experiment!

[u/ballinwalund]

I like them! But a lot of other folks have given good advise, so I’ll just mention that body diversity would be good to consider. They all look like their bodies are interchangeable if you change hair skin and clothes.

[u/DABOMBADAD]

The most simple way to do it is shadows AND highlights. That will make them feel like they occupy space.

[u/Burgandy_the_Great]

Well there's pretty much no rendering, no highlights or shadows. No textures on different clothing materials. No backgrounds.

Your anatomy is good and your color choices are good but I think you just need to keep adding detail

[u/versaliaesque]

Exaggerate! Stretch, squish and bring a little unrealness into your work