Chapter 1 – Proportion caricature and appeal

Chapter 1: Proportion Caricature & Appeal

Created by Sarah Choi (prompt writer using ChatGPT)

Proportion Caricature & Appeal for Costume Concept Artists

Style Systems: Stylized ↔ Realistic for Costumes (Shape • Edge • Value • Palette Rules)

1. Why Proportion Caricature Matters in Costume Design

When people hear “caricature,” they often think of cartoon faces with big noses and tiny chins. In costume design, caricature is broader: it is the deliberate exaggeration and simplification of proportions, shapes, and visual priorities to make a character instantly readable and emotionally appealing. You are not just drawing clothing; you are designing how a player or viewer’s eye will experience that character in motion, at distance, and under production constraints.

On a style spectrum from highly stylized to grounded realism, proportion caricature is your main steering wheel. By pushing or relaxing proportions, you control how whimsical, gritty, heroic, or mundane a costume feels, even before you add fine detail. A slightly oversized coat, a dramatically high waist, or an impossibly long ribbon all bend reality to highlight personality, class, power, or role.

For concept artists in the early phases, caricature is exploration: you test how far you can bend the rules while keeping the character coherent. For production‑side artists, caricature becomes a system: you must lock in rules that can be applied consistently across skins, variants, and outfits, respecting animation and technical boundaries. The core idea is the same for both: exaggerate with intent, then control it through shape, edge, value, and palette rules so that the design is appealing and shippable.

2. The Stylized ↔ Realistic Style Spectrum for Costumes

Think of style not as two boxes (stylized vs. realistic) but as a slider with useful anchor points. Each project has its own “style band” on this slider. Proportion caricature helps define where that band sits and how wide it is.

At the highly stylized end, costumes rely on bold, simple shapes, clear silhouettes, and strong exaggeration. A mage might have a hat twice the size of their torso, floating sleeves, and a cape that defies gravity. Fabric behaves more like graphic shapes than physically accurate cloth. These designs must read at a glance and survive small on‑screen sizes.

At the grounded realism end, costumes obey anatomy, gravity, and believable tailoring. Proportion changes still happen, but they are subtle: slightly longer legs on heroes, slightly bulkier jackets for brawlers, a modest exaggeration of scale on armor plates. Details such as stitching, seam placement, and fabric behavior matter more, and any caricature must feel plausible.

Most games live somewhere in the middle. One character might lean stylized (cartoonish boots, simplified folds), while another leans realistic (tactical gear, realistic strap systems), but they must still belong to the same world. Your job is to define and respect the rules of that world’s style system:

How far can we stretch limbs or torso lengths before it breaks animation or believability?
How oversized can props and costume elements be relative to the body?
How flat or shaded are our materials and values?
How simplified or complex are our color palettes?

Once you know the allowed exaggeration, you can safely caricature for appeal without confusing your audience or your production team.

3. Proportion Caricature: Big, Medium, Small Decisions

Caricature often starts with simple big‑medium‑small thinking. You decide which zones of the character will dominate (big), support (medium), and accent (small). This is true for both anatomy and costume.

Big: These are the major, high‑impact forms—the cape, coat, skirt, shoulder armor, or headdress. Pushing these big shapes is what makes your costume memorable. Oversizing them makes the character read strongly even at distance.
Medium: These forms tie big shapes together—the vest under the coat, the belt, the boots, bracers, and bags. They keep the design coherent and prevent the silhouette from being too simple.
Small: These are fine accents—buckles, trims, jewelry, embroidery, pattern details. They are where realism and craft often show, but they should not overpower the big and medium shapes.

Caricature is deciding where to concentrate scale: a tiny body under a massive coat, or a very long, elegant torso with understated clothing. Appeal is maintaining a pleasing rhythm between these scales. If everything is big and loud, nothing stands out. If everything is tiny and fussy, the character is noisy but forgettable.

For concept‑side artists, play with big‑medium‑small ratios aggressively in thumbnails. For production‑side artists, translate those broad decisions into consistent measurements: how many “head units” tall is the character? How wide can shoulder armor be in relation to hips? How long can a coat go before it intersects the ground in animation?

4. Shape Language: Caricature Through Forms

Proportion caricature is built on shape language. Shapes carry emotional weight: they hint at personality, mood, and role. When you exaggerate costume proportions, you should also exaggerate the shapes that carry those emotions.

Squares/rectangles: Stable, strong, solid. Great for knights, tanks, protectors, and grounded NPCs.
Triangles: Dynamic, aggressive, sharp. Great for assassins, rogues, villains, or high‑tension characters.
Circles/curves: Soft, friendly, approachable, magical, or childlike. Great for healers, comedic characters, or whimsical NPCs.

Caricature is deciding which shape family dominates and then exaggerating it in the proportions. A triangular assassin might have a wide, angular shoulder cloak tapering to slim boots, creating a strong V‑shape from head to toe. A circular healer might have rounded shoulders, bell sleeves, and a gently flared skirt with curved hems.

On the stylized end of the spectrum, you push these shapes hard: geometric, simplified, almost graphic. On the realistic end, you keep the same underlying logic but let fabric behavior, gravity, and human anatomy soften the edges. A realistic soldier’s armor might still hint at squares and triangles, but through plate arrangements and pocket clusters instead of perfect geometric blocks.

For production artists, maintaining shape language across a skin line or faction is crucial. If a faction is defined by triangular, spiky silhouettes, every variant costume must echo that—even if one is “casual streetwear” and another is “formal armor.” The degree of caricature can change, but the shape identity remains.

5. Edge Logic: Silhouette, Contour, and Internal Edges

Edges are where shape meets value: the transitions between forms. Edge decisions determine how caricature feels—sharp and snappy, or soft and believable. For costume design, think in three layers of edges: silhouette edges, contour edges, and internal edges.

Silhouette edges are the outer profile of the character. This is where big caricature choices live: massive hats, asymmetric cloaks, trailing ribbons, towering collars. A strong, readable silhouette is key at stylized scales, especially for top‑down or distant camera views.

Contour edges define the large surface breaks within the silhouette: the hem of a coat, the line where a sleeve meets a glove, or the outline of a pauldron. These edges guide the eye across the character and can emphasize direction and rhythm. A chain of sharp triangular contour edges along a cape can make a character feel more dangerous; a sequence of soft, rounded contours feels gentler.

Internal edges are smaller details—pockets, seams, trims, pattern breaks. In realistic designs, these may be more numerous and subtle, contributing to believability. In stylized projects, internal edges are simplified and strategically placed so they don’t clutter the silhouette.

On the stylized side, you will often:

Keep silhouette edges bold and simple.
Limit contour breaks to a few deliberate stops.
Use internal edges sparingly, often as clean graphic lines.

On the realistic side, you will often:

Allow more nuanced contour breaks (layered clothing, overlapping gear).
Use internal edges to show construction—seams, darts, collars, gussets.
Control edge sharpness through material (a metal plate edge is crisper than a padded jacket edge).

Production artists must translate these edge decisions into clean topology and texturing. Overly complex silhouettes can cause animation problems, while excessive internal edge detail may be lost at game resolution. The trick is to preserve the big caricature edges that define identity, and compress or simplify smaller edges where needed.

6. Value Structure: Caricaturing Light and Dark

Value (light and dark) is one of your strongest tools for caricature because it controls what the viewer notices first. In a stylized design, you might treat values almost like flat comic panels: bold darks against big lights. In a realistic design, you may use more gradual shifts, but still exaggerate contrast in key zones.

Think of value caricature as deciding where you break the image into large light and dark masses. For example, a character might be mostly dark from the waist down (boots, pants) and light from the waist up (shirt, coat) to focus attention on their face and chest. Or the opposite: a light skirt under a dark, heavy jacket to ground the figure.

For stylized costumes:

Use simple value groupings: 2–4 main values across the whole costume.
Make sure the silhouette separates clearly from the background in key poses.
Use value contrast to mark interactive or gameplay‑critical areas (hitboxes, glows, UI‑related pieces).

For realistic costumes:

Use more value steps but maintain clear big‑shape grouping (macro values).
Suggest materials through value: satin vs. wool, matte vs. shiny, polished vs. worn.
Use localized value exaggeration (darker folds, brighter highlights) to keep read strong in game lighting.

Both concept and production artists should think in terms of “value maps” for characters or factions. A stealth faction might tend toward mid‑dark palettes with occasional sharp highlights; a royal faction might favor light mid‑values with gold accents. Caricature here means emphasizing those tendencies so they are obvious even when characters are seen briefly.

7. Palette Rules: Color as a Style System

Palette rules ensure that your caricatured proportions, edges, and values still belong to a coherent world. Even the wildest outfit can feel grounded if it obeys the project’s color logic.

For stylized projects, palettes typically use:

Fewer hues, carefully chosen for maximum impact.
High color separation between costume zones (top vs. bottom, skin vs. gear).
Strong use of accent colors for class or role identification (healer green, tank blue, DPS red, etc.).

For realistic projects, palettes often:

Stay closer to real‑world fabric and dye ranges.
Use more desaturated, complex colors that still cluster into a few major families (earth tones, military greens, industrial blues).
Use accent colors in smaller, plausible doses (lining, stitching, insignia).

Palette rules interact with proportion caricature. A massively oversized coat becomes visually heavier if it is the darkest, most saturated element on the character, and lighter if it uses mid‑values and gentle hues. A long ribbon in a bright accent color becomes the focal point—even if it is small in area.

On the concept side, you often test multiple palette options per costume: one that sits in the “neutral baseline,” one that pushes saturation for event skins, and one that pulls back into realism. On the production side, you define palette swatches, color IDs, and material definitions so that 3D artists and texture painters can match them reliably.

Good palette rules for a project answer:

Which colors are reserved for major roles or ranks?
Which neutrals (greys, browns, muted tones) hold the design together?
How saturated can accents be before they fight UI or background art?
How do colors shift for night vs. day environments or different maps?

These rules help keep caricature grounded: even if silhouettes get wild, the colors will say, “This is still our game.”

8. Balancing Stylized and Realistic for Appeal

Appeal is the quality that makes a design pleasant or compelling to look at, even if the character is meant to be scary, ugly, or grotesque. It is not about beauty; it is about clarity, rhythm, and intent. In costume caricature, appeal comes from balancing exaggeration with structure.

At the stylized extreme, designs can become too simple or toy‑like if everything is reduced to clean shapes and flat colors. Appeal comes from a few carefully chosen breaks: a pattern, a single complex accessory, or a few well‑placed folds. At the realistic extreme, designs can become cluttered and dull if every seam and pocket is accurate. Appeal comes from simplifying and grouping forms so that the costume still reads in big shapes.

To balance stylized and realistic, ask:

Does the silhouette convey the character’s role before you see details?
Do the edges and internal shapes guide the eye to the face or core story element?
Are value and palette choices supporting the main story of the costume, or competing with it?
Could you reduce them to a simple, graphic thumbnail and still recognize the character?

Concept artists should err on the side of exaggeration in early passes, then dial it back based on feedback and technical constraints. Production artists should err on the side of clarity and functionality, then preserve as much of the original exaggeration as possible without breaking rigging, skinning, or performance.

9. Concept Side vs. Production Side: Different Responsibilities, Same Language

Although concept and production artists have different day‑to‑day tasks, they benefit from a shared vocabulary around caricature and style systems.

Concept‑side responsibilities include:

Exploring the full range of exaggeration possible for a character or faction.
Delivering shape‑focused thumbnails that show big‑medium‑small decisions clearly.
Providing edge logic: where silhouettes are complex vs. simple, where internal detail lives.
Presenting clear value maps and palette variations that fit the project’s style.
Building style guides that show “too far,” “just right,” and “too realistic” examples.

Production‑side responsibilities include:

Translating caricature into shippable models and textures that respect animation and gameplay.
Simplifying silhouettes that are too busy or risky while preserving identity.
Compressing internal edges and detail into readable texture information.
Maintaining palette consistency across skins, variants, and LODs.
Documenting exact proportions, scale limits, and material recipes.

In practice, this means concept artists should annotate their work with notes like “cape is intentionally oversized (1.5× character height),” or “boots should stay below knee for animation.” Production artists should provide feedback upstream, such as “hat intersects camera in close‑ups; reduce height by 20%” or “trim count is too high for low LOD; can we simplify pattern?”

When both sides treat caricature, shape, edge, value, and palette as shared systems rather than personal taste, the project stays cohesive even as multiple artists touch the same character or skin line.

10. Practical Checks and Exercises

To really internalize proportion caricature and appeal in costume design, it helps to practice deliberately. Below are exercises that concept and production artists can both use, each focusing on shape, edge, value, and palette.

10.1 Shape & Proportion Exercises

Pick a familiar archetype (knight, thief, healer, pilot) and design three versions of their costume across the style spectrum: stylized, hybrid, realistic. For each version, write a one‑line rule about proportions, like “hat is 2× head height” or “boots cover half of the thigh.” Compare and see how far you can push without losing believability.

Take an existing game character and create a “big‑medium‑small map” by drawing over them in solid black, marking big shapes, medium shapes, and small accents in different layers. Ask: where is the caricature? If there is none, where could you insert some without breaking the character’s identity?

10.2 Edge & Silhouette Exercises

Silhouette‑only thumbnails are a classic, but try a variant: draw the silhouette, then, in a second pass, add only contour edges (major form breaks) in a mid‑grey. Limit yourself to five contour breaks per design. This forces you to prioritize edge complexity and keep your caricature clean.

For production practice, take a highly stylized silhouette and redesign it to reduce clipping risk and unnecessary geometry while preserving the same read at distance. Flatten or simplify certain edges, and test it as a flat black shape against a mid‑grey background.

10.3 Value Mapping Exercises

Choose a reference character and convert them to grayscale. Squint or blur until only three value masses remain. Paint a simplified version using only those three values. Then, reinterpret the same character at a different point on the style spectrum by changing the proportion of each value mass—for example, making the costume mostly mid‑value with dark accents instead of mostly dark with mid accents.

For production side, test how your value structure holds up in different lighting scenarios—bright day, dim interior, colored lighting. If critical costume information disappears, consider exaggerating value contrast in those zones.

10.4 Palette Rule Exercises

Create a “faction palette card” with 3–5 main colors and 2–3 accent colors. Then, design three costumes that all follow this card but differ strongly in silhouette and proportion caricature. This practice teaches you how palette rules tether wild shapes back to a coherent world.

For a realistic project, collect fabric swatches and real outfits, then adjust their colors slightly to fit a shared hue bias (all leaning slightly cooler or warmer). Note how small shifts can make disparate outfits feel like they belong to one setting.

11. Building a Style System Document

On any serious project, especially with multiple costume artists, it is useful to formalize your caricature choices in a “Style System” document. This document doesn’t kill creativity; it protects it by setting clear boundaries.

A Style System document for costumes might include:

Proportion charts: standard character heights, limb ratios, and allowed exaggeration ranges for each archetype.
Silhouette and shape callouts: examples of faction silhouettes, banned shapes (too modern, too sci‑fi, etc.), and edge complexity guidelines.
Value maps: typical light/dark distributions per faction, and exceptions for special skins or story moments.
Palette swatches: primary, secondary, and accent colors, with notes on usage and saturation limits.
Do/Don’t pages: side‑by‑side comparisons of “on‑style” vs. “off‑style” caricature and realism.

Concept artists use this document as a playground boundary, exploring within it and occasionally proposing rule updates. Production artists use it as a reference to enforce consistency and flag deviations that might cause technical or readability issues.

When kept living and updated, this Style System becomes the shared language that allows new team members to ramp quickly and senior artists to steer the project without micromanaging every outfit.

12. Closing Thoughts

Proportion caricature is not just a cartoon trick; it is a fundamental tool for costume concept artists in any style. By deliberately bending reality through shape, edge, value, and palette, you guide the audience’s attention, express character, and keep designs clear in motion and at distance. The stylized ↔ realistic slider is not about choosing a side; it is about understanding where your project sits and how far you can safely push.

For concept‑side artists, exaggeration is your friend: push, explore, and discover the most appealing, communicative versions of your characters. For production‑side artists, discipline is your ally: preserve the heart of those exaggerations while adapting them to the realities of rigs, cameras, and performance. When both sides work from the same style system, caricature becomes a precise instrument instead of a vague taste.

In the end, the most memorable costumes are rarely perfectly realistic. They are purposeful exaggerations of reality—edited, simplified, and caricatured just enough to make them unforgettable while still living convincingly in their world.