I absolutely adore drawing OCs. I cannot get enough of it. I love helping bring people’s characters to life! But it means I really need to set some baselines to touch upon with commissioners, so without further ado…

⭐ references are so, so important. If you can, find face claims, scour pinterest (or a better reference site of your choice) and put together a mood/aesthetic board, or just save a whole bunch of pictures that you think ‘yes, this is my character in essence.’ Compile it for your artist! They’ll appreciate it.

⚠️ Be careful about using existing art from other artists that are not drawn for you! You can use them as reference for minor things, like perhaps they have an outfit you like, or a hairstyle, but no artist wants to be given an existing art and told ‘I want it exactly like this’! 

⭐ I always tell my commissioners to be as wordy and descriptive as they can!

⭐ It always helps if you have an idea of what they’re doing, but if you don’t, no worries! Just describe to me what their behaviour/personality/background is like and I’ll try to come up with something that’ll do it justice! (it can affect patterns or motifs on your characters)

⭐ If you don’t already have existing pictures, or have a few face claims but they’re not quite what you want and you’d like modifications, being descriptive about stand out features help!

⭐ Creating new outfits for your characters is all well and good, but all fantasy clothes have something to base them off of! 

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Playing around with doll makers and character creation is actually extremely helpful in giving your character a little bit more flesh! A lot of them can be a little limited, but its totally ok to show the end results to your commissioner and request some fixes when needed! 

Here are some handy links for character creation, dollmakers, and face claims (other people can feel free to give suggestions to their favourites, as there are so many out there!):

Hero Forge
Elouai (a whole host of various dollmakers! mostly a certain style though)
Doll Divine (also a host of various dollmakers! More varieties)
Hero Create
A List of Curated PicCrew Makers (PicCrew creators are made by individual artists! Might take some navigation because its in japanese, so I hope you can read or have google translate on)
Azalea’s Dolls (also a host of various dollmakers)
A Reddit List Of Character Creation Games
CharacterCreator.org
This Extensive character creation template for ideas
Some Face Claim Directories (you can search them on google too!)
Colour Palette Generator: (x) (x) 

its meant to be a collaboration between you and the artist you’re commissioning! 💖💖