As I have mentioned previously on this blog I would love to license some of my character designs, and while I keep on trying have not quite managed it yet. I put a tweet out asking for advice on licensing character designs out and via my other twitter handle @ideasuploaded I got a very helpful response from @FWD_LB (forward licensing). Abdel Boazzati from Forward Licensing told me to email him with my questions and he would be happy to give me some advice. I asked him if I could share his response on my blog to help others and he agreed.

I sent Abdel some of my character designs and asked him the best way to present them:

Defining the Characters and Brand

1. Demographics: define for each character target ages, gender (eg. Boys 4-8yrs old), have a 1sheet of each character

2. Lifestyle: define activities of the characters in terms of activities, interest and opinions (can see that you have done that with your main characters)

3. Define each character with a human personality to make identification and or aspiration easier.

4. Define the overall brand through some of the main brand differentiators: sincerity, excitement, competence and sophistication.

Once you have done the above it will be easier to define which categories and licenses you want to get into.

Categories for Licensing Characters

There are roughly 6 main categories available for licensing:

• Toys
• Softlines (eg Apparel)
• Hardlines (eg personal care)
• Retail
• Publishing
• FMCG (fast moving consumer goods)/Promotional deals.

The main drivers for a licensed program are toys and softlines (typically 60% of revenues of licensing is done in these 2 categories) so it will be easier to approach companies in these categories once you want to start marketing your brand.

In terms of presenting your character designs, you can chose to go down 2 routes:

Either you:

1. Put together what is called a styleguide

Which means you put a document with high res images together which has the following: different designs of character, background, packaging, fonts to be used etc. This means you will be able to keep a closer control on how the brand is treated.
All the big licensors work like this except see below.

or

2. Just put some basic characters together

Just put some basic characters together and leave the licensee to be creative with your brand, of course keeping to the brand dynamics and staying faithful to its core qualities. The biggest licensed brand works like this: Hello Kitty. You will get more creativity you can use for your other licensees but you need to keep a closer look and give more detailed briefs to your licensees.

Create Mock-ups of your Character Designs on Products

In all the cases, if you are going to present to a licensee the best thing to do is do a mock up, eg if you are presenting to an underwear licensee make some mock ups on how the brand can be visualised on the garments.

Animation shorts are not necessary, eg there is no TV series of Hello Kitty but it can help to get more deeper in what the brands wants to transmit.

FWD Licensing and Branding’s Mission is: first and foremost to nurture your brand and understand its strengths in order to unleash its full potential. We do this by extending or licensing your brand, while keeping its core values intact – introducing it into new categories, new lines and new targets to ultimately conquer new retail space. We have the capacity and experience to create a vast array of new opportunities for business that would otherwise remain untapped. EXTEND your brand ACCELERATE your growth

I have just today heard about some free 3D software which allows you to sculpt amazing things almost though you are using digital clay. The 3D software is called Sculptris and unlike most 3D software with this program you start of with a ball of clay and there is a tool set which allows you to push here and pull there and do all sorts of weird and wonderful things. I have downloaded and tried it quickly just with a mouse, although the makers suggest it works better with a Wacom tablet.

You can download free Mac and PC versions at http://www.pixologic.com/sculptris/

Check out the two videos below which show some of the capabilities of the software

Check out the podcast here

Squaredy Cats™ is copyright Monkey Doodle Dandy, Inc., Kurt Marquart and Elaine de la Mata

http://www.monkeydoodledandy.com
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Sneh has challenged herself to create one vector character a day for a year

I am not sure I could be so disciplined to create a character a day for a year but I admire her for doing so. Check out a few of her characters below and visit her blog to see more.

Have you got a personal design project you would like to share – please contact me via my contact form

Part 1
What is licensing? Licensing is when you give the rights to someone to use your design/artwork in return for a payment/royalty. You retain ownership of the design. Different types of license can be granted from the right to use the design on one item in one country to worldwide rights.

It’s now been a few years since I first started to try to license some of my character designs. I currently have a licensing agent who has been trying to license the character designs for me and it looks like I might finally be one step further as a TV production wants to get on board (I have a meeting set up with my agent next month). When I first designed my characters I really had no idea what a licensing agent would require to try and sell my designs, but my agent has been incredibly helpful showing me examples and telling what he needed so I thought I would share this with you. One thing I now know is that nothing happens quickly in the world of licensing, a character may be created but not make it to the shelf or TV screen until 5+ years later.

So if you have created some characters and want them in a form to present you will need:

• A brief synopsis – which says the type of character they are, their names – their personality ie. happy, sad, bad tempered etc along with what they do – ie. do they have special powers, what is their relationship to the other characters, where do they live etc etc.
• A turnaround sheet showing all angles of the characters front, back, side, and 3/4 view
• What colours are used in the character ie. pantones
• Size of the characters – ie. are they the size of a human or the size or a pencil for instance, how do the size of the characters relate to each other.
• Create a logo that becomes the brand of the character
• Drawings of where the characters live
• Ways in which the characters could develop  - do they have pets, could more characters be created in the future.
• Perhaps think about showing how the characters could be used – ie. show them on mugs, cards, childrens clothes etc.

You will also need to think about protecting your idea via possible design registration and trademark registration for your logo (this is an expensive process).

Its is incredibly difficult to find any free information about licensing design and artwork. One of the best bits on online information about creating and licensing character designs I have found is -

Tips on Creating, Monetizing and Popularizing Digital Characters

and also check out How to get started in Licensing the video from the creator of this blog is shown in the video below

A few videos explaining about how some artists began licensing their work

If you are a budding artists, character designer or illustrator there are bound to be times when you need human figure reference. I was recently looking for some books to help with figure drawing and showed different poses but in the process of searching came across a website that could really help.

Characterdesigns.com is a website which provides resources and information for artists, illustrators and designers, one of these resources being figure reference photos of people in different poses. There are several sets of photo poses which you can chose from a drop down menu. The figures include action, facial expression, nudes and figures in costume. Although some are a little rigid/posed they are a good starting point for getting proportions etc right.

Also on the site are photos of events such as fashion shows and anime expos, all again which can act as good reference for drawing the human figure. There is also a section where artists and illustrators can display there work and a forum too. As this site grows I think it could become an excellent resource for artists and designers alike.

As some of you may know I am a big fan of character design and try to keep an eye on what is going on online. I discovered Cedric Hohnstadt’s website and blog a little while ago and thought it was worth a mention. What I like about Cedric’s site is the way he has been sharing his experience of some online character design training he has been taking with Schoolism. Schoolism features online training in digital design and character design. The character design training is done interactively where the student follows a supplied brief each week uploads their drawings which the tutor will then draw over digitally in video form to show how they think the drawing could be improved. You can see an artcast by Stephen Silver about the course on his website. The course looks very tempting but is fairly expensive at $998 dollars for nine lessons, but that includes personal critiques.

Anyway back to Cedric and his website and blog, take a look at some of the lessons he has taken part in. I especially like the portrait studies exercise which shows how starting with different face shapes – a circle, square and triangle can really change the look of a character. Take a look and see if you can get any inspiration for your character designs.

I have like the character designs of Jon Burgerman since I first saw them in Computer Arts magazine. His character designs are very child like using thick black line and bright colours.

Over on Youtube I found an interesting clip where Jon Burgerman created a black and white mural in Derby UK using the people as inspiration. He then got the community involved doing the colouring in. Take a look.

I found the site http://www.mojizu.com a few weeks ago and thought it was quite a unique idea I hadn’t seen before. The site allows users to upload their own character designs, which can then be voted on by the character design community and prizes are available for winners. Other features include the Mojizu war where two character designs are put head to head and a winner is again voted by users.

There are real mixed bag of characters from the most basic amateur attempts to slicker professional looking character designs. What Mojizu has done, which I think is a really clever idea is created a shop where the top characters can be purchased on limited edition merchandise, a percentage is given to the artist and I would imagine this could be a real money spinner for Mojizu who benefit from not only the character licensing but also the print margin. Mojizu top characters are also available as mobile phone characters

If you are interested in character design take a look at http://www.mojizu.com