Visual Development Is More Than Drawing the Same Character 30 Times
Visual development can look a little ridiculous when you remove it from the context of the creative process. You might have a page filled with thirty versions of what appears to be the same character, a pile of historical references, scraps of clothing, photographs of objects, and a handful of tiny red marks indicating that, for some reason, silhouette number twenty-nine did something the previous twenty-eight couldn’t.
From the outside, it can look like indecision. From inside the process, it is almost exactly the opposite.
Visual development is how I make decisions before investing too heavily in any one of them. Rather than beginning with a vague idea and immediately trying to turn it into a polished character, I can pull the idea apart, exaggerate different pieces of it, remove things I assumed were essential, and see how far the design can change before it stops feeling like the character I’m trying to create.
For me, that is where character design becomes less about drawing and more about thinking.
The First Idea Is Usually Just the Beginning
One of the easiest traps in character design is becoming attached to the first competent drawing. You have an image in your head, put it on the page, and something about it works. Maybe the costume looks interesting. Maybe the pose captures the right personality. Maybe you’ve finally managed to draw the face exactly the way you imagined it.
The temptation is to start finishing it.
That can also be the moment when exploration ends prematurely.
A successful first drawing proves that one version of the idea works. It doesn’t tell me whether there is another version that works significantly better. More importantly, it doesn’t necessarily tell me why the design is working.
When I’m doing visual development, I want to separate those questions from the satisfaction of producing a finished image. I don’t need every drawing to be good. I need every drawing to tell me something.
That changes the purpose of iteration. Instead of repeatedly trying to improve the same drawing, I’m testing different arguments for what the character could be.
Reference Gives an Idea Something to Push Against
My process usually involves gathering reference before I begin exploring the design seriously. The development sheet accompanying this article includes historical clothing, masks, gloves, boots, layered fabrics, headwear, and other visual material that caught my attention while I was working through the character.
I don’t collect reference because I intend to copy individual objects into the finished design. I’m interested in understanding the visual language behind them. How does a heavy garment change someone’s proportions? How does fabric bunch around the shoulders? What happens to the silhouette when clothing extends beyond the natural shape of the body? How does a particular mask conceal the face? What makes an object feel ceremonial rather than practical?
Reference gives me information that imagination alone often doesn’t.
This is especially useful in fantasy design. When there are no rules, it becomes remarkably easy to design something that feels like it has no reason to exist. You can keep adding armor, belts, spikes, cloth, jewelry, weapons, symbols, and increasingly elaborate details until the character is technically complicated but visually meaningless.
Real objects provide constraints. They have construction, weight, materials, history, and function. I can distort those things enormously, but beginning with something tangible gives the invented design a foundation.
The goal isn’t historical accuracy unless the project requires it. The goal is credibility.
Then I Throw Most of the Information Away
After spending time collecting visual information, one of my favorite things to do is remove almost all of it.
That is where silhouettes come in.
On the development sheet shown here, I explored thirty-two versions of the character as essentially black shapes. There is no elaborate rendering to hide behind. Facial features disappear. Most costume details disappear. Color disappears. Texture disappears. Even anatomy becomes secondary.
What remains is the character’s overall shape.
Suddenly I have to ask different questions. How much space does this character occupy? Where is the visual weight? Is the upper body overpowering the legs? Does the head interrupt the silhouette in an interesting way? Does hanging fabric make the character feel ceremonial, decayed, imposing, or simply messy? Does asymmetry help? Is the figure recognizable at a small scale?
Removing information makes those decisions easier to see.
It also exposes designs that depend too heavily on surface detail. If a character only becomes interesting after I add dozens of straps, ornaments, textures, and costume elements, I want to know whether the underlying design is actually doing enough.
Silhouette isn’t everything in character design, but it is an extremely effective way of stripping a design down until you can see its structural decisions.
The First Five Versions Are Usually the Obvious Ones
There is a reason I like pushing silhouette exploration beyond a handful of variations. The first few designs often aren’t particularly surprising.
They’re the ideas I already knew I had.
I change the shoulders. I alter the coat. I try a different head shape. I make the figure taller or heavier. Those experiments are still useful, but I’m mostly translating existing assumptions onto the page.
Then those answers begin running out.
By silhouette ten or fifteen, I have to work harder to produce something meaningfully different. Eventually I reach the point where changing a minor costume detail isn’t enough to justify another variation. I have to question something larger.
What if the proportions are completely different? What if the element I’ve been preserving in every version disappears? What if the visual weight moves from the shoulders to the lower body? What if the character becomes almost symmetrical? What if I make them dramatically more asymmetrical? What if I combine two ideas that initially seemed incompatible?
This is where repetition becomes useful rather than redundant.
Iteration forces me beyond the ideas I arrived with.
If I stop after three versions, there’s a good chance I’ve simply drawn three variations of the same assumption. If I force myself to keep going, eventually I have to begin inventing new assumptions.
A Silhouette Doesn’t Have to Win to Be Useful
The little red marks scattered across my development sheet indicate designs that caught my attention, but they aren’t necessarily finalists in a competition. I’m not looking for silhouette number twenty-six to defeat silhouette number twenty-nine and receive the prestigious honor of becoming the finished character.
One version might solve the head shape. Another might have better proportions. A third might create an interesting relationship between the arms and torso. Something I dislike overall might contain a single shape that becomes essential later.
That’s why I try not to think about concept exploration as a series of successes and failures. An unsuccessful design can still provide useful information.
Sometimes it tells me what the character shouldn’t be.
That matters.
As the process continues, I start recognizing boundaries. Certain proportions consistently feel wrong. Particular shapes keep returning because they feel appropriate. Some elements survive almost every experiment, while others disappear as soon as I stop treating them as mandatory.
The character gradually develops a visual identity, not because I discovered one perfect drawing, but because dozens of smaller decisions began agreeing with one another.
Character Design Starts Before the Audience Knows the Character
One of the reasons I care about silhouettes is that audiences encounter visual information before they understand narrative information. You can know absolutely nothing about a character’s history, personality, motivation, or role in the story and still form an impression almost immediately.
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Shape creates expectation.
A massive upper body communicates something different from a narrow, elongated figure. Long hanging garments create a different impression from tightly fitted clothing. A perfectly symmetrical figure feels different from one whose outline is constantly disrupted by objects, weapons, fabric, or unusual anatomy.
Those associations aren’t universal rules. There isn’t a character-design dictionary where broad shoulders automatically equal strength and a hood automatically equals mystery. Culture, genre, context, and individual experience all influence how we interpret images.
That’s what makes visual development interesting.
I can use an expected visual language or deliberately contradict it. An intimidating silhouette can belong to a gentle character. A seemingly fragile character can be incredibly dangerous. Something that initially appears ceremonial might turn out to be practical equipment.
The design creates expectations that the story can later confirm, complicate, or destroy.
Rendering Can Become a Very Expensive Distraction
I love rendering. I can happily spend hours painting fabric, weathering materials, adding stitching, designing tiny props, adjusting colors, and inventing details that most people will probably never notice.
That’s exactly why I sometimes need to avoid it.
Rendering creates the feeling of progress because the image becomes increasingly finished. Unfortunately, an increasingly finished image isn’t necessarily an increasingly successful design.
If the fundamental idea isn’t working, detail can become an expensive distraction. I can spend five hours beautifully rendering a coat that should never have been on the character in the first place.
Working quickly changes the economics of that decision. A silhouette might take minutes. If it fails, I’ve lost almost nothing. If it reveals something useful, I can carry that information into the next iteration.
Only after the larger decisions begin working do I want to start asking increasingly specific questions about materials, construction, color, costume details, props, and surface treatment.
Detail should strengthen the character, not perform emergency surgery on the design.
The Mess Is Where the Design Actually Happens
Finished concept art can create a misleading picture of visual development. Everything gets arranged neatly on a presentation sheet, the strongest variations are selected, and the process suddenly appears remarkably organized.
The actual experience is rarely that clean.
You repeat yourself. You make something worse. You accidentally rediscover an idea from twenty minutes earlier. You spend time exploring a direction only to decide you hate it. You combine two designs and somehow get the worst qualities of both. Then you make some stupid little change almost absentmindedly and suddenly realize it solves a problem you’ve been fighting for an hour.
Creativity looks considerably more logical in retrospect than it feels while you’re doing it.
That’s one reason I think showing process is valuable. The polished final character only shows the answer. Development work shows the questions that made the answer possible.
It also demonstrates something that can be difficult to remember when looking at professional artwork: artists don’t necessarily know where they’re going when they begin.
Sometimes we are drawing specifically because we are trying to find out.
Visual Development Is Visual Problem Solving
The longer I’ve worked as an artist and designer, the less interested I’ve become in treating visual development as merely a preliminary drawing stage. It is closer to a form of visual problem solving.
A drawing becomes a hypothesis.
What if the character looks like this?
I make the image and evaluate the result. Maybe part of it works. Maybe none of it works. Either way, I now have information I didn’t have before.
The next drawing responds to that information.
Over enough iterations, the process begins narrowing. Certain decisions become stronger while others disappear. Eventually I reach a point where I am no longer asking what the character could be in the broadest possible sense. I understand enough about the character to begin asking how a particular version should actually work.
That’s when I can start worrying about the details.
Ask Better Questions Before Making Better Pictures
Modern creative tools make it incredibly easy to move toward polished imagery. Digital painting software, 3D tools, enormous reference libraries, and now generative AI can help us produce convincing visual material faster than artists at almost any previous point in history.
That makes it tempting to measure creative progress by how quickly an idea begins looking finished.
I think that can be backwards.
The faster our tools become at producing answers, the more important it becomes to spend time figuring out which questions are worth asking.
For me, visual development provides that space. I can make thirty-two silhouettes without needing thirty-two finished characters. Each version can be disposable because its purpose isn’t necessarily to survive into the final design. Its purpose is to reveal something about the idea.
I’m Rieley Finn, an artist, illustrator, and designer, and a significant part of my creative process is learning when not to finish something. Sometimes I need to stop rendering, remove the detail, flatten the character into a black shape, and see whether the idea underneath everything still works.
Visual development isn’t about drawing the same character thirty times. It’s about becoming a slightly different designer by the time you draw number thirty-one.
About the Author
Rieley Finn is a digital illustrator, designer, writer, and founder of Seven Spirit Media, where he helps businesses build memorable brands through design, illustration, web development, and digital strategy. Through his essays and artwork, he explores the intersection of art, philosophy, psychology, technology, and culture.
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