This morning, a friend was muttering on Twitter about how she always uses the same cute-Disney shapes for her stuff. And I was like, okay, take your same familiar characters, and draw them with *different* shapes and proportions, see what happens.
In general, I find that there are a few major ways to construct drawings: you can build them out of spheres and ovoids, out of rectangular blocks, or out of triangles. All of these methods have their advantages and disadvantages, and a pro is likely to use some or all of them at different points of the construction phase (and, to be honest, probably does a lot of it on ther head instead of on the page). But different characters have definite biases to certain shapes.
You probably have a default that all your characters trend towards if you’re not thinking too hard. A certain number of heads high. A bias towards ovals, triangles, or rectangles. Quite possibly this bias has something to do with what you see in the mirror; I know mine does.
So thinking about this suggested an exercise: get a little drunk (so you have an excuse to not care about making a “good drawing”) and draw some stuff that deliberately uses different shapes and proportions than your usual stuff. Were you weaned on three head tall Sonic character made out of spheres? Draw some nine head tall anime boys made out of triangles. Did you grow up drawing seven head tall superheros made out of bricks? Draw some rounded cuddly things. Mix it up, learn to draw some new shapes so that everything doesn’t kind of blend into this endless parade of the same two or three bodies with different hats and hairdos over and over again.
I was not willing to do this exercise too much myself today, but here’s a quick attempt at it: my dragon character Peganthyrus, who is all about the tall skinny triangular shapes, with the corners smoothed off, reinterpreted as a short assemblage of ovals, and a squat series of rectangles.
(Because I am a horrible person, it quickly became established that Short, Rounded Peggy is an utterly vicious person who will as soon eat your arm as talk to you. Dragons are like that.)