Why I Draw Characters the Way I Do

Hi, I'm Amin — a 2D character designer and illustrator working across book illustration, prop and environment design, and poster work, mostly in a stylized cartoon language. I want this blog to be a place where I think out loud about the work: the decisions behind a character, the small rules I follow, the things I'm looking at. Starting here felt right for a first post. **Design over anatomy** A question I keep coming back to: why does a rooster character read as "male" the moment you give it a mustache, even though real roosters don't have mustaches? The answer isn't biology — it's visual convention. A character doesn't need to be anatomically correct to be believable. It needs to follow rules the eye already trusts. That's the core of how I approach character design. Every character is a set of decisions: which proportions read as "friendly," which silhouette reads as "villain" before a single line of dialogue is written, which small prop tells you a character's job in half a second. Getting these decisions right matters more than getting the anatomy right. **Where I look** I keep coming back to a few artists who think this way too. David Hockney, for how flat, saturated color can still describe deep space. David Shrigley, for how much a simple, almost careless line can carry. And Miyazaki, for proving that a children's story can hold real weight without ever talking down to its audience. None of these are style references I copy — they're permission slips. Permission to simplify. Permission to let a drawing feel handmade. Permission to trust that a story for "all ages" can still mean something to an adult. **What's next** I'll be using this space to walk through process — sketch to final render, how a prop gets designed to fit a world, how a poster idea gets narrowed down from ten bad ones to one good one. If there's something specific about character design or illustration you're curious about, I'm happy to write about it — feel free to reach out through the contact page. More soon.