Worldbuilding 1: Character Design

Building worlds like we used to build brick houses. One piece at a time.

“Worldbuilding is the process of constructing an imaginary world, sometimes associated with a whole fictional universe.  The resulting world may be called a constructed world. Developing an imaginary setting with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, and ecology is a key task for many science fiction or fantasy writers.  Worldbuilding often involves the creation of maps, a backstory, and people for the world. Constructed worlds can be created for personal amusement and mental exercise, or for specific creative endeavors such as novels, video games, or role-playing games.” - Wikipedia

While the term worldbuilding most often refers to the creation of an fictional fantasy or science-fiction world, there is a degree of worldbuilding in any fiction, as a result of choosing what details will be in the story, and which ones will be left out. However much literary fiction takes place in our own reality, we all live subjective, individual lives. For someone who lives on a farm to read about the life of an assassin in the Black Ops requires a significant departure from one’s own world, however much it is the “same” reality.

If you are interested in telling stories, then worldbuilding is a part of the process one way or another. This course doesn’t dive very deep into the writing components of worldbuilding, but it will focus on discussing how we tell visual stories. How we create the components of a different world for a graphic novel, illustration, film, book, etcetera. I’ve also found the best worlds are the ones that don’t need to explain themselves. They’ve been figured out so well that, as a viewer or reader, we just don’t question their credibility or believability as a potential place that could exist.

In this course, we will go through simple plot development and storytelling structure, then tease out from our basic story foundation different locations, characters, and story artwork that we can create. This is a very visually-focused storytelling course, guided by the philosophy that the visuals of a story can lend an equal hand to the plot as writing can. We tend to think that the manuscripts must always come first, but as every visual artist knows, you get a ton of idea simply be beginning the sketching process.

There is so much to cover in this course, so it will be split into two courses, the first being this one, which focuses on the character design of your story. The second one will be called Worldbuilding 2: Backgrounds.