Quick Tip: Brainstorming Head Design, a Focus on the Eye Line

Varying the horizontal axis line (the eyeline) and adjusting the spacing of the eyes are two excellent methods used to brainstorm new character designs. In this tutorial, we look at a few simple, but effective, techniques you can employ to give your characters personality while making them both fresh and visually interesting.

Varying the Eye Line

The eye line is the imaginary horizontal axis line that demarcates the placement of the eyes on a character’s head. One simple technique to add visual interest to a character is by varying the position of this imaginary line.

The higher the eye line, the smaller the "brain bucket". Conversely, the lower we place the eye line, the more intelligent the character appears to be.

Once you have the eyeline drawn, you can experiment with drawing different hair styles, etc. to give your character his or her unique look.

Varying the Eye Spacing

To give our characters even more variety, we can increase or decrease the spacing between the eyes, as the image below illustrates. The "normal" spacing gives us a normal character, but affecting the spacing of the eyes in either direction gives us something far more interesting to work with.

To see the overall effect, let’s keep the features of the character the same to study the variations
we can get just by moving the eyes around.

Conclusion

By varying the eyeline and eye spacing, you can quickly develop interesting variety in your character designs. By drawing the elements in different groups you can play around with the spacing without having to redraw them each time. I hope you’ve enjoyed this quick tip.