How to Represent Different Ages in Cartoons

Effective visual storytelling almost always relies on thoughtful character design, even if the character’s a prop. That’s why we’ve packed so many features into Cartoons’ Character Creator including the ability to create characters of different ages. This is now one of the first tools presented to new Cartoon makers. When you need to build a cast of characters from various stages of life, though, where do you begin? Here are a few examples:

The examples above show how a few thoughtful design choices—from body type to hair color—can clearly and convincingly convey various stages of life in your characters. Having the ability to represent characters of diverse age groups can be a powerful tool in any animator’s toolkit, especially to depict age-specific relationships like parent and child, and all of these scenarios can be created using Cartoons.

4 Tips to Create Characters of Any Age in Cartoons

1. Select your character's body type

Body type is one of the easiest ways to depict various stages of life. Whether your viewers are in Bangkok or Berlin, they'll register that babies are small and adults are large.

Children are shorter and weigh less than full-grown adults, making the child body type perfect for younger characters. However, it's trickier with older generations where teenagers, adults, and older people can share the same body type. While real life doesn't have any rules for weight across age, in animation you can use normal or fat body types to suggest the weight as advance through life.

2. Customize facial features and hair

Children don't have facial hair, fine lines, and gray hair are also typical features from a particular age group. By adding or removing these features from your characters, you can help signal their age to audiences.

Cartoons' Character Creator lets you choose face shape, eye, nose, mouth, eyebrow, ear, hair, and glasses customizations that you can combine to convey a specific age.

With the pair on the left, notice how a mouth with wrinkles can help us suggest a character is older, even with the same height, weight, and outfit of their more junior companion. Similarly, for the pair on the right, viewers will assume the character on the right side with the cropped hair is older than the figure with shaggy hair. To take this even further, you could use the RGB color selector to change their hair color from black to gray.

Of course age isn't an exact science. Some young people have fine lines and wrinkles and some old people keep their hair long and shaggy. Keep in mind that your characters can appear however you see fit, capitalizing on your assumptions can help you communicate your story more clearly.

3. Design age-specific outfits

People of all ages are free to wear what they like, but we tend to associate clothing choices with specific generations. Teenagers own band t-shirts to showcase their musical taste while someone in their late 20s or older could be wearing medical scrubs while on the job.

Inside Cartoons' Character Creator, you can choose top and bottom garments by clicking on the one that best represents them. The clothing choices range from casual pieces to work-related apparel.

A teenage baseball player wearing a sports tee aligns with the person's age and what they do. We'd expect him to wear that on the field or even for daily errands. On the flip side, dress that the same character in a pirate costume might think he's wearing a Halloween costume.

4. Add facial hair and/or accessories

Cartoons' Character Creator lets you modify the color of mustaches, beards, and accessories. You can alter the hue of a character's mustache, beard, and accessories—such as changing a mask from green to black—or turn the facial hair to gray to signal age.

While varying a character's facial hair can help communicate different ages, there are ready-to-use options to age a character, such as police officers' hats. Other accessories can make your characters more youthful such as an academic cap.