Identical Faces, Identical Faces Everywhere 01-When to reuse a characters face and when to avoid and other ramblings

Let's take a look at something that I have mixed feelings about.

The recycling of identical facial design.

Uh Oh. South Park Elementary's girls are not amused about being used as this post's figurehead for criticism.

Unfortunately, this is something we're just going to have to live with no matter how we do art. 

TV TROPES calls this design problem ONLY 6 FACES because it's the act of recycling character designs in art forms such as animation, comics, DeviantArt art pieces, video games, etc.

The only change you need to make is the character has a different hairstyle, article of clothing, makeup, or skin-tone.... and maybe modify the face to be chubby or emaciated.

It also explains the nobody looks identical in real life and if that was possible, it's only a coincidence.

But that doesn't change the fact that it's a blatant case of recycling the design of characters from one character to another.

Before anyone asks whether or not I have the right to complain about this recycling of character faces, I will admit I too am guilty of doing this but it can't be helped.

This is a problem that I had to work out when creating the characters of Austin and Hayden Brentwood as shown below.

The difference between the two is that Austin is age 24, so pretty much a working adult while his younger brother Hayden is age 14 so clearly, I had to work out the differences in design without resorting to only height.

For one, Hayden is 14 so I had to do things like make his cheeks a bit chubby to emphasis that young exterior as well as give him relatively large eyes to also emphasis his age.

Austin on the other hand is older by a decade so concessions had to be made in order to differentiate from his younger brother. For example, he's taller by 4 feet and he's much lankier than Hayden.

So now that I've shown you all my guilt for reusing character designs of my own

(Don't worry, I've got almost 1000 more of my own drawings to self-deprecate to),

Let's get back into topic.

Why do productions or artists reuse the face of other characters?

Because it's the the production can't afford to create a specific design different from another or that the artist is lazy.... again, this is sort of self-deprecating myself.

And sometimes this can result from the evolution of a character's design.

The Simpsons for example had some specifics to the design of the titular family when Matt Groening first drew them for the Tracey Ullman show in 1987.

Most of it was due to his somewhat lack of artistic experience to creating well-drawn designs for characters that aren't from LIFE IN HELL.

Now let's all take a look at how the Simpson family looks after decades of cleanup from David Silverman.

Looks more like David Silverman's Simpsons than Matt Groening's. But the faces are all the same. The only difference is the hair. Homer is bald, Bart has spikes on his tincan head shape, and both Lisa and Maggie have starfishes for hair though Maggie has fewer points and probably more rounded tips.

Marge on the other hand is the only one with a specific hairstyle.

Either way or another, until the appearance of more specific characters as well as celebrities, early SIMPSONS characters were nothing by recycled but hey, this was in the early seasons so what are you going to do?

No matter the evolution of the show, Family Guy's many characters that isn't a celebrity unfortunately recycles the same designs for some characters and any child that isn't Stewie, Meg, or Chris is going to look the same.

Even anime is not immune to this. 

Speaking about anime, 

I remember seeing several episodes of Monthly Girls Nozaki-Kun 

(Dubbed mind you) 

where the characters criticize the main character for drawing the same manga character over and over again and the main character admits he does that because it's the easiest for him to draw.

What a way to self-deprecate yourself Nozaki-Kun

Again, there's no way to fight this off. We recycle character designs, change hair styles, modify the face, it's all in the art and that's the way it is. 

Whether it be a Western Animated cartoon, Japanese Anime, film, etc., you will have no choice but to recycle a character's face just to create a new one.

But recycling is just the icing on the cake. There's also another phenomenon's called Recycle and sex change as well as Clone and Recalibrate but those are for another blogpost.

What about video game characters?

Well the results vary from model to model but most of the time, you're going to see the same face on NPC characters no matter what.

I know that from experience since I often play GRAND THEFT AUTO on my PC so I know first hand where to find characters with identical faces.