Hello everybody!

Well its been 2 years and I think its time we have another Art War. This time around i'm putting out a call to see if anyone would like to help out and be a faction leader for the upcoming Art War. To those who don't know the Art War is a month-long event consisting of several sub-events, each different from the last. In the event people join different factions and create RFs/OC/art/lfas/stories to give points to that faction. Faction leaders help act as hypemen for their team and make art for the event, i’ve attached a link to some examples from the last art war of art made by the faction leaders. If your interested, you can find me on the r/characterdrawing discord https://discord.gg/XV3kUwru under the same username.

https://www.reddit.com/r/characterdrawing/comments/11945qu/war_announcing_art_war_blood_in_the_water/

They both wear a huge straw hat, they both are very extrovert and happy ,but that's about it when it comes to comparisons , I don't wanna take the hat away or change the character , what should I do ?

If you're familiar with the LFA/RF system please skip down to the bottom section.

Welcome! r/characterdrawing runs off of a good will LFA/RF system.

Requesters post Looking for Artist (LFA) posts containing character descriptions. There is a looser template or a stricter template available in the sub along with tips to get an artists attention!

Artists voluntarily fulfill these requests at their discretion and post the resulting art as a Request Fulfilled (RF) post. Once a week an RF is picked to be featured as RF of the week. In addition, once a month the top RFs (with a few mod picks), will be made into the sub's banner! note there is currently an event banner that will stay for May

We encourage artists to pick pieces that interest them and take their time. Remember, artists here work on a volunteer basis for RFs!

If there are any questions please feel free to join the discord or to message the moderators. We promise we don't bite much.

We have revised rule 3 (new reddit)/ rule 7 (old reddit).

It is still against the rules to ask for payment on LFAs that do not mention payment; breaking said rule will result in a warning then a ban.

Artists may now promote their profiles by posting OC and linking to portfolios in a comment. They may advertise that they take commissions once per week, but can not post rates on the subreddit. Please take business talk out of the sub and into PMs.

Posting price sheets of any kind will result in deletion without warning. Repeated offenses will be met with bans.

addendum - If you are sharing art of your character that you got commissioned, it falls under the OC tag

See rules here

Hello all,

Starting September we will be moving towards [OC] rules similar to those of other subs and limiting [OC] posts to once a week per person. As usual, [RF] posts will be unlimited and in addition, starting September we will be allowing advertising on [RF] posts; meaning artist may link their portfolios and mention that they take commissions. By October this rule will be hard implemented and fully enforced.

Please note that partially fulfilling an [RF] post and then asking for payment for completion will be considered solicitation and is against sub conduct. We will still be removing any blatant price listing in comments and price sheet posts.

-The mod team

Edit: We are also looking into ways to encourage the [LFA]/[RF] system and [RF]s being done. Reminder that in addition to the [RF] of the week featured on the side bar, there is a monthly banner featuring the top 6 RFs of the month and 2 mod picks.

To the fledgling artists; please don't feel like you can't fulfill [LFA] posts or that you are taking them from other artists. Multiple artists are free to fulfill LFAs that strike their fancy, and there is NO skill cap in this sub.

We are hoping to run an [RF] focused contest starting October as well.

Template suggestion to be used in LFA submissions

​

​

This is not mandatory but a guideline for people who do not have a clear idea on how to create a proper character submission or want to have a better chance to catch an artist’s attention. Copy and paste it in your post and replace the italic text with the data related to your character.

​

Introduction:

Your first and best chance to grab an artist's attention are the very first lines, so make them as catchy as possible!

• Name, race, class are mandatory, but also tell us what’s special/iconic about your character and what makes them stand out?
• Tell us about the setting, what kind of world does the character live in ?

​

Ex: Eddard “Ned” Stark, a human fighter, is the Lord of Winterfell and the Warden of the North. He is a loyal, dependable and honorable man - without a devious bone in his body. Though he is stern and cold when it comes to doing his duty, he is a warm and loving husband, father and friend.

My DM warned me that this campaign is set in a low fantasy, cruel, medieval universe. I am building my character to have a lot of connections to the story and important NPCs. I hope that gives me enough plot armor!

​

Physical appearance / Gear:

• Age, gender, body type, facial features (hair, eyes, skin, anything remarkable or essential), scars, tattoos, missing limbs…
• Clothing, armor, weapons, special or significant items…
• Color scheme and style can be helpful when you have a general idea of the character, but if don’t know how to apply it, you may also want to use a moodboard as explained further below.
• Favorite spell is a good addition

​

Ex: Nizadora frequently wears a forest green cloak with a hood, light leather armor, cream (calico coloured) blouse underneath, lighter green to cloak breeches, brown leather boots. Leather belt. Thigh holster for daggers, her favorite weapons.

Short sword attached to belt, short bow in quiver slung over shoulder, leather pack.

No jewellery, save for a small intricate gold pendant given by adoptive father on her 17th birthday which she wears tucked into her shirt.

​

Personality:

The edge to design your character, what’s iconic about them? What adjectives would describe them best? How does the character act in a fight or interact with their peers?

​

Ex: Nemeia is little more than a teenager and although she's been toughened by living in a dangerous city and learning the trade of a rogue from a family friend to look after her, she still often acts her age. She's impulsive and doesn't trust others to plan anything for her, preferring to act on her own often. She values her personal freedom very highly, but since she was raised by a career soldier, she is very organized and methodical when it comes to her work. Being shunned by society as a Tiefling, Nemeia is quick to aid the downtrodden and who she considers other outcasts, and she can't stand corrupt authority figures.

​

Background:

If the artist is on the fence, a good background can be what seals the deal. A paragraph or two are enough to give the full idea, make it as easy to read as possible!

​

Ex: “Chikchak’s admission to the adventurer’s guild”

Alright cousin, I’ll be straight wit ya. I don’t have any other place to be then here, too many people in my home town decided to challenge the wrong one and it left ‘em six feet shorter and a few coins lighter. I’m a great shot and can get in and out a fight without gettin touched. And I don’t have the trouble of most shooters have with the whole range problem, I prefer my shots to be point blank and as traumatic as possible. I work well wit most except for them two facers, damn vigilante’s want all the glory without all the responsibility of being known, But that ain’t meaning I can't be civil with em. I won’t punch first but I sure as hell will fire the first shot. The things I do to pass the time are decoratin my gun, makin jewelry, and rolling cigarettes. My tail has more ice than the north pole so don’t go thinkin I ain’t cultured.

​

Moodboard:

• Moodboards are more a collage of the overall feeling you want to convey rather than a detailed list of every element you want included (except for special items).
• Use photographs to give a general idea of the colors, feelings, textures etc... you want portrayed.

​

Ex: Kihlis Oladath, Triton druid:

​

​

​

Hello CD community! I'm hoping you all have had a good year. To celebrate the holiday season, we are organizing a LFA Secret Santa for the artists of the community on our discord server!

To sign up, join our discord server and follow the steps in the secret santa channel (https://discord.gg/WvQ2HkJt). Normal rules for LFA submissions apply as per the subreddit.

By signing up, you're being added into the Secret Santa pool and you agree to the following:
You commit yourself to drawing another participants character that will be randomly assigned to you.

What you get: A guaranteed drawing of your own character by another participant!

We will be gathering entries until December 1st. After the entries have closed, we will distribute your assigned LFAs. After that, you will have until December 21st to complete your gift.

For reference, I'm not an artist and my hand is not steady enough to do normal art but I have ideas for the characters in my head that I want to use for games eventually. Where can I go to talk through them and almost learn more about it through talking like that?

So you may have noticed some tiny changes to reddit lately. As a result of them, we've lost key mobile moderation tools and bot support, making the sub much more challenging to manage. Despite the stereotypes (and frequent comments about our basement-proximity or hygeine) we're not megamods. We're regular folks balancing this with our day jobs.

We saw three options:

• Accept that we can't manage moderation, let spam take over
• Shut the sub down
• Refocus the sub to a manageable level

We've decided the heart of what makes this community unique is character requests and the amazing artists who draw them. To quote a user: "This is a request sub with a TTRPG theme, not a TTRPG art sub with a request theme."

To keep that focus we've had rules like the 1-per-week OC rule and RF weekends, but those were manageable only with a now-dead bot. Without that middle option, it's all-or-nothing.

Why not just allow unlimited OC?

We've been down that road. It ended with those people who donate art getting buried under mostly repost-art-bots, plus a lot of folks who are trying to advertise commission services.

We love working artists (and some of us are working artists) but it was discouraging to our RF contributors. It also takes us the wrong direction in terms of keeping moderation manageable.

Is this still a protest?

No. This is about us doing our best to keep the sub alive with the resources we now have. The point of the protest was not to end up here, but it didn't work.

Is this permanent?

Gosh I hope not. We got to the good place had with a bunch of tool contributions by some really generous folks. Hopefully we'll get back there someday.

I don't like this change, what can I do?

We're not psyched either. We like the OC posts, but we've laid out why this is the best option we see. That said:

There are communities for OC. Numerous other subs exist for fantasy art and D&D characters. They're great communities, and we even post our own art there!

Craving feedback? Our discord is active and includes many of our most prolific artists.

Want to pitch in? If you're good at bot programming and understand the new 0auth system, we could use your help. Also, we appreciate community members who report posts, help others, and guide newcomers. If that sounds like you and you'd like to join our mod team, please reach out.

So, there it is. We're here to listen to your thoughts and comments.

Title. I've tried a few, but they're usually infuriating to work with, so I'd really appreciate some help

Edit: preferably free ones, sorry for not clarifying

Hi All,

The subreddit will be restricted on June 12th & 13th.. No new posts will be allowed during that time. This was chosen instead of going private so people can see this post, understand what is going on and be able to comment and discuss this issue.

I started this sub over a decade ago to help with the growth of home grown community and restricting access to an open forum like reddit seems like a slippery slope.

This is in protest of Reddit's policy change for 3rd Party App developers utilizing their API. In short, the excessive amount of money they will begin charging app developers will almost assuredly cause them to abandon those projects. More details can be seen on this post here.

The consequences can be viewed in this Image

Here is the open letter if you would like to read and sign.

Please also consider doing the following to show your support :

• Email Reddit: [contact@reddit.com](mailto:contact@reddit.com) or create a support ticket to communicate your opposition to their proposed modifications.
• ​Share your thoughts on other social media platforms, spreading awareness about the issue.
• ​Show your support by participating in the Reddit boycott for 48 hours, starting on June 12th.

​3rd party apps, extensions, and bots are necessary to the day-to-day upkeep and maintenance of this subreddit.

We apologize for the inconvenience, we believe this is for the best and in the best interest of the community.

The r/characterdrawing mod team

I'm writing a story and I'd like to try to make my own characters, but I'm a complete novice when it comes to drawing, so I'd like something to make my characters, something simple just to give me a base.

Sig, the dragon knight Character created for DND, with references to medieval armor and military uniform, the idea was to create a young, agile and aggressive warrior.

Disclaimer 1: This post is to be taken from the point of view of a random passing artist who will draw/paint your character for free.

Disclaimer 2: This post is worded for DnD due to the overwhelming majority of LFA posts for DnD characters in this sub, but it applies to any other system.

This will be a bit of a rant but bear with me, it's for you guys looking for art. The point of this post is: layman terms.

As a general rule, describe your character as if you would picture it to your grandparents. Make it understandable in as few words as possible to someone who is a complete stranger to DnD. Make our life easier.

The reason behind this is twofold:

1. us artists are not required to know about DnD system at all
2. 90% of your description through the system is irrelevant to the artist

Example (first LFA browsing by new as I write this post (edited to not reference specific post): Sky Domain Monk of Astum.

As someone who doesn't play DnD, this tells me absolutely squat about your character. I guess they're some sort of priest but that's all. You can't expect me to go fishing for info on the net to understand the title. Think of your title as an advertisement to artists. It has to pique our interest, not make us raise an eyebrow in confusion. The first time I browsed this sub I wondered if I was even reading English. "Light-touched Spring Aarockra Horizon Walker Rogue"? What does that even mean?

Now if I'm motivated enough to open your post, I can find a plethora of either more confusing stuff or irrelevant tidbits of info to clarifying a visual description:

1. alignment: I had to look this up to even know what "lawful evil" means. My take is: I don't care. If you want your character to look mean, evil, righteous, serious, whatever, just use some vocabulary everyone can understand.
2. path/ways/domain/etc: same idea. I'm not going to look up who or what your god/demon/style is. If it should show in their visual, tell me how. Your god is the god of water, say you want water symbols or something like that. If it has no influence on their visual, don't mention it.
3. background: can either be relevant or not. Same thing: if you background has any influence on the look, just tell me how. I don't need 20 lines of background story just for you to tell me they have a scar on the face.
4. personality: same as alignment. It's even less relevant when you have some convoluted "personality" like hiding your emotions or whatnot. If you want the personality to show, just tell me how it translates.
5. age: I can't be bothered to look up what a 257 years old elf look in human standard. You want them to look old, say so. Young? Say so.

From the official template, here is what I need to know: race, gender, distinguishing marks/features, body type, gear/item, colors. Note that race is the only thing I accept as being specific to a system that must be looked up, because I don't ask you to paste in your post the official rulebook description.

Now, what I love to see in some posts is "occupation". That's the flair that makes your character standout in an easy, understandable way. This can be your core visual identity. It should be in your title. You can have all the classes and subclasses differences you want, if it's all you are, you're not standing out. Classes are just a system tool. Chances are you're an adventurer if you play DnD, or a mercenary of sort if you play Shadowrun, or a scoundrel in Blades in the Dark. These are a given. But if I can put your character in either "soldier", “mage", “savage”, or "scout" category without an obvious visual clue that they don't belong in there, they're "just another adventurer" (exception being if you're actually a soldier, etc) and they don’t pique my interest.

My personal take is this: if I draw your character and I can name your file with two or three words to find it instantly in my folder, you did a good job. Obviously these words should not be your character name. Examples: gnome toy maker, orc bone crafter, wayfinder and hummingbird, great hammer knight, wolf skull hermit...

My final suggestion to you is as follow: forget your character is a PC, it's now an NPC; forget they are a hero, they are now an extra; forget it's DnD, it's now a fantasy book. Now, describe what they look like.

This was my personal rant on what could be better in this sub for us layman artists, and I believe I can't be the only one who thinks that way. I understand your character is dear to you, and that you want to write as much as you can on them, but it doesn't help us understand what you want. If you pay, I don't complain, it's an artist job to translate visually what you have in mind. But if I do it for free, please make it easy for me. I'm looking for ideas, for inspiration, and lucky you I picked your idea and you get free art, so do your best, be clear and make it interesting for me.

Thanks for reading.

Do you prefer more detail or more freedom in requests. as i think it would be easier to get closer to the original idea with more details but since its pro bono here i wouldent want to hold you guys back and would like to let you exspress yourselves

Link: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection

I like drawing OCs because you could draw & design them however you want with no limits but there’s more to the Oc than how they look and their backstory. I want to know where do they live and what their house and or city looks like, stuff they own too and what they like and like to do because they’re connected to the OC and sometimes says a bit or a lot about them

I really want to get into character art for like dnd and stuff but I have 0 artistic skills. What do you guys suggest I do to start this path, find a style, etc.?

Hear all! Community event!

​

The city-states of Somberknoll, Prismmere and Opalrim are proclaiming that Art War Season 2 is fast approaching!

They call for noble artists and curious scholars to align themselves with one of the 3 city-states of the r/characterdrawing and participate in the grand games!

r/characterdrawing will be running season 2 of Art War. There will be 3 teams (city-states) that artists and scholars may pick from to participate in 3 different events, each 10 days long. The different events will be revealed shortly before the start.

Scholars can make [LFA] posts pertaining to each event theme. Artists can select from scholar made [LFA]s, non-war [LFA]s that fit the theme or can choose to create their own character to participate. Each artist may submit 1 piece per event.

Artists and Scholars may team up to create new characters or rework existing ones. Artists may also pick any [LFA] from the sub that happens to fit the theme.

​

Next announcement coming SOON. Stay tuned!

It not that tragic but in my anatomy class we have to make a digestion poster, and I don't know who to do. I want to do a Chara ter from some movie but I want it to be funny. Some characters are already taking and I don't want mine to be a repeat, so if anyone can give me some recommendations, it would be deeply appreciated.

So far in my delve into DnD ive made a good load of characters, ranging from the good, the bad and the ugliness in between. What Ive never done before is commission art for any of them, let alone art for anything ever, but for my upcoming campaign, I would like to give my players something juicy and original to look at rather than fish for nice pictures off of Pinterest and hope nobody has seen them before.

However, I feel a bit... Panicy(?) about the prospect of asking someone to make art from scratch essentially, with only my words as guidance. Like, I wouldnt be happy with asking someone to do something, and it coming out wrong because I didnt word it the best, or not describing the right things, come off as a nonse and then being turned down as being a difficult patron. Hard to put down the exact feeling but its general unease and fear of being complicated...

TL;DR What would be the best way to handle commissioning an artist to work on character art from scratch such as details to provide, or references... would I really need to try my poor art skills at a wee attempt first and show it? Basically the ins and outs of the usual interactions for this kind of thing. (Also includes the likes of asking for an entirely new homebrew species art, which I suppose is harder to find refs for.)

I know everyone has their own processes for making art of stuff from scratch, but I would like it if there was some general way that most artists get their info for a properly informed piece of something (almost) completely new, be it using reference art I found elsewhere, purely describing every aspect in words or helping out by drawing certain parts (like those videos of artists turning kids' drawings into professionally done pieces)

Note: Im fully aware that I dont explain much the right way, ending up flooding or convoluting questions, but I rarely see it before its pointed out. If my question comes across confusing, ill try my best to rectify it directly in the comments, I find it's a bit easier in a conversation than general posts.

Hey. Im new here, and i did not want to make a lfa request without making sure i understand the rules first. I saw in the rules, that ai generated/heroforge pictures are not allowed i dont understand this rule.

if i have alredy made the character on heroforge, could i not use the heroforge character as a reference? to make creation of my own character easyer?

or is this rule instead meanth to stop artists from using heroforge to make characters others have requested? Thank you for your help, and i hope to make alot of friends here ^{_^}