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Okay, so most of you who know me know that I LOVE buggy-type people and characters with an insect or arachnid theme. They're not popular enough in my opinion and there should be more buggy characters out there! There's so many cool and pretty looking bugs out there to base characters on!

Been thinking a lot about visual design and what makes a character appealing looking in a design sense for bugs recently. Like a general theory of do's and don'ts for buggy-type design that can still appeal to most characters without entering the dreaded 'bug-squig' or 'OH MY GODS IT'S SO GROSS LOOKING' territory. Obviously the easiest thing to do is stick antenna on the character and maybe do something interesting with the eyes, but that really can't express the variety of designs that the bug world has to offer.

Like for example, you want a character to be bug like, but still be cute and likable, then bug parts for the mouth probably not a good idea. There's artist's that can pull that off, but it's a very specific skill. Should probably have the faces be human looking for the most part. Extra eyes can work, but not too many. The human face doesn't have alot of room for extra's of that stuff and still stay expressive and pleasant looking. The key here is a design that lets a character be expressive in a relatably human way. Can maybe have little mandibles, poison fangs, or feeler things, but they should probably be little extra things on the cheeks rather then the mouth themselves... or just be fangs in the mouth. Cause little pointy teefs can be cute, but a vertically split mouth will really gross a lot of people out. You want eyes to be expressive the way humans eyes can be expressive, and mouths to be expressive the ways human mouths can do it. I think a great way to do it with eyes is make them solid to give that compound-effect, instead of having an iris or pupil, cause you can draw those as bigger or smaller as the expression requires, and they can still have eyelids to express with. If you need multiple eyes, you can put little tiny extra dots in the place where eyebrows would be. They can still generate the same expressive look, while still looking buggy.

On the main body, I think I'm starting to feel that extra arms is the way to go to very easily evoke a bug theme and still keep a character appealing. People seem to be able to handle extra arms without too much trouble. So long as there's not too many extra arms! Like one set of extra arms maybe and that's it? That get's the bug idea across and means you can otherwise draw a character the same way you would draw a normal human or fur, but the idea of them being an ant-person is easy to see.

An extra set of legs isn't a bad idea, but I kinda think you should pick one or the other.. .Like... an extra set of legs, or an extra set of arms. It's all about boiling it down to it's simplest expression. Like an extra set of arms would make a character look like an ant person, but an extra set of legs would make them look like a spider person. Probably don't want to do an extra set of legs and an extra set of arms on that spider... that's too many limbs and you start loosing people again. You can probably get away with 3 sets of legs, to show a bug person walking the way bugs do, but you've then entered taur territory. I think a taur with 2 or three sets of legs isn't too hard for people to get behind... but more limbs then that and people start to get weirded out.

Also if you're doing an extra set of legs, then make sure the character is drawn in a quadrupedal stance. like.... two sets of legs that work in a human way? That... doesn't make a whole lot of functional sense and that would also weird people out. If you're doing extra legs, then stick to a tauric structure. That's the winning route I think.

Tails, abdomen, stingers? Sure! Not a problem for the most part. People understand tails, and in the end those extra parts just end up looking like a sort of weird looking tail. The key thing here is making sure that they stay in proportion with the rest of the body. Don't make 'em too big, don't make 'em too small and you should be fine. Same goes for wings. People like pictures of faeries for the most part, so it's not hard to get behind a buggy character with wings. Again, try to keep them in proportion. Don't make them ridiculously huge.

That's where my brains been going recently anyway. As just a general way to design characters that are both functionally simple, but also appealing looking in a basic way that average people can get behind and not get grossed out. There's also like... simple practicalities involved too. One of my main characters is a tauric spider lady but I've found over time that I haven't drawn as much art of her as I'd like. Why is that? Well ...at the basic level... having to draw eight legs is both very complicated and time consuming. If she only had four legs, she'd still look like a spider, and I'd probably draw her more often. It'd be a lot easier to figure out how to pose her and other things like that if she had less legs to worry about. LEss stuff to worry about? Easier to draw! Pretty simple concept.

The ideas I've laid out above, I think, makes it very easy to express nearly anything in the bug world in a unique way, but also have a design that is relatable to the common person and also very easy to draw.

You can see which part is the most important to me. ^_^

With that system, you could draw a girl that has an extra set of arms, give her antenna, and an abdomen butt, and you'd have a cute little ant girl. Give that ant girl wings and some unique markings and she could be a bee or a wasp. More specialized critters like dragonfly's, scorpions, or spiders, are fairly easy to express in this system. Even something like a centipede or millipede! Just draw them the way someone would draw a naga or snake-person monstergirl and you've done!

All of these rules are of course flexible and mutable. To a point. I think you can get away with bending or breaking one or two of the rules... so long as you keep the rule breaking to a minimum. People can handle a character with one 'weird' trait to it. You start breaking two or three rules.. and then you've not only made your character too weird for most people to handle, but you're also in danger of sparkle-dragon territory. The idea's I laid out above help to create a character that expresses the theme, but also has a 'balanced' look it it. Start piling too much stuff onto it and the design starts to look unbalanced. Pile too many details on there and the design starts to become too complicated. Not easy to look at and understand in a glance and very very difficult to draw. Ideally you want to express what you're trying to express but with the least number of extra elements as you can manage to create something that is simple to understand by looking at it, and something that is also fun for artists to draw.

Anywho these are just my thoughts on some stuff that's been buzzing around in my head lately. Design theories! Weeeee! Lemmie know what you think! Agree? Disagree? Have some alternate ideas? Feel free to post them below. Would love to hear them. This is the stuff I nerd out on. I think it's all super rad. :3

Take care, all!

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