Mood boards are some of the most creative ways to express your written works in order to help you understand the feeling, vibe, and look behind what it is that you’re writing. Oftentimes, graphic designers create mood boards for clients in order to show their respective client what the brand is about. However, writers can also employ similar techniques in order to express something very similar for their own works. Many writers create mood boards for their characters, countries, religions, etc… As a writer in fantasy and sci-fi, I’ve long made mood boards for all my stories because it helped inspire me even more when I went to actually write. Sometimes, I’ll just glance at my mood boards so that I know what I want to write in a certain writing session. So, today’s post will explain how you can create mood boards for your characters!
Characters are a vital and important component of your book obviously, so you need to put in enough effort in your characters in order to help your readers see why you care and thus why they should care too.
Of course, no two mood boards will be alike — each person will have their own respective style and that’s totally fine! In fact, I encourage you to explore different mood board styles before settling on one that will fit what you think is best for you.
STEP 1: DESIGN YOUR CHARACTER
The first thing that you should ensure you have before making a mood board is to actually have a character that you’re going to write about. I have a full guide on how to create a character for your books with tips and tricks, so you can go check that out.
For the most part, you want to try and visualize who your character is and what they look like. The idea is that you already have a good idea of what your character’s personality is before you make a mood board because that personality can affect the results of the mood board in terms of color scheme and visual design features.
Additionally, knowing who your character is will give you more passion when creating their mood board. You will already have some slight connection with the character because you just spent a good amount of time designing, crafting, and curating that particular character.
STEP 2: THINK OF A COLOR SCHEME
I studied quite a bit of graphic design and what I learned is that in a mood board, you want to have a color scheme. By this, I mean a range or selection of colors that fit the particular theme of your mood board.
We often associate human qualities with colors because we humans like to associate things with humanity. That’s why you’ll see red being associated with villains, romance and similar concepts. Blue is associated with cool, calm, collectedness. And so on and so forth.
Once you know who your character is, picking a color scheme for them depends on what you associate color with. I’ll use an actual example of a character from my series, The Fallen Age Saga. That character is the Nightmage.
For me, thinking of the Nightmage, I have several colors in mind, but the most significant colors are red and black. That’s because the Nightmage is made of fire, rock, and lava. For me, these natural elements look like red and black in my head. So, my color palette for the mood board should revolve around these colors.
STEP 3: FIND OR MAKE IMAGES
When you’re creating your mood board, you can use any type of image you want. At the end of the day, this mood board is for you and it’s for your personal use so it’s alright to use other artwork you see online to create it. So long as you don’t claim that that artwork is yours or you don’t sell the mood board, you’re fine.
Pinterest is my biggest source to find images that match my character. The cool thing about Pinterest is that you can pretty much look up anything you want and chances are, you’ll find the thing you’re looking for.
If I’m writing a story about a character who is an assassin, I can just go to Pinterest and search up ‘Fantasy assassin art.’ This is what I got from Pinterest:
I would say that these are some pretty cool pictures and I already have some cool ideas for this character based on these images.
On my Pinterest profile, I have several Pin boards dedicated to different genres that you can check out to help you find your own inspo pictures for your mood board. And while you’re at it, drop a follow on Pinterest so you can see all my latest pins and more!
AI ART
Now, for the other alternative, you can make pictures yourself. By this, I mean that if you’re an artist, you can draw or create your own art. If you’re not really an artist then what you can do is try to make pictures using AI. I know that there is a lot of controversy surrounding AI art, but this is for the purposes of your story and if it helps put what you see into picture form, I personally don’t find there to be an issue with this. I use AI art quite frequently because sometimes there’s just a specific image in my head that I need done and I can’t find the idea I want online, so AI helps me facilitate that.
There are a lot of AI generators like MidJourney and Leonardo, but I personally find that the easiest to use is Bing’s AI image creator. Bing’s AI image creator is super simple because it doesn’t require sophisticated prompts. You can really just speak in plain language to it and it will understand.
Now, disclaimer: With AI, you’re gonna get some silly results sometimes. Other times, there will be messy faces and limbs and extra or missing fingers–this is part of the AI process. You can try to work around it by telling the AI to not include or exclude limbs or fingers, but it won’t always work. Still, it’s pretty good at creating images that don’t have much “human” stuff to them.
Let’s try out a prompt: Fantasy assassin dressed in black robes standing atop a roof at night.
I dunno about you, but these are not bad. They do look obviously like AI, but they at least get the point across in terms of what my character looks like in my head.
We can make the prompt more specific like this: Realistic photograph of a medieval fantasy assassin dressed in black robes standing atop a roof at night. Make sword realistic. 8K rendering. High quality.
We get these results:
So, the more specific you get, the more the prompt has to work with and can tailor your image to look like how you want it to look.
You can play around with the AI as much as you want until you get the images you desire. Just be sure to save the ones you like somewhere, especially if you’re using Bing because the images can disappear.
STEP 4: START YOUR MOOD BOARD
The first thing I like to do when creating my mood board is determining what my layout will look like. If you’re not really looking to create something totally from scratch, you can use things like Canva templates to create your mood board. Canva has a lot of designs and some are really good in my opinion. Of course, you can always adjust the way your mood board looks to fit your personal design preferences, but you can just use the template as-is, of course.
Once you’ve found a template or have made one from scratch, you want to start placing the images you want in.
Here’s my mood board base:
Now, I can create my mood board by placing in the images and the color palette. Here is a mood board design I made for the fantasy assassin I’ve been working on in this post:
This is a random character that I just came up with, but I’ll probably end up re-using this mood board for another character later, haha! All of the images were made with AI in that one. But if you want to see one where I just went to Pinterest to find pictures, here’s one I made for Joel Vandernod from Soldat, Book 2 of The Fallen Age Saga (my series):
And here’s one with a mix of images (AI and Pinterest):
At the end of the day, your mood boards are totally up to you! You can make them as elaborate or as minimalistic as possible. The whole idea is that you’re creating this board to help you visualize and understand your characters and the idea behind them as people.
Feel free to add quotes and other things to spruce up your mood board too!
Hopefully that helped you see my process on how to create a mood board for a character. Before you go, check out my series, The Fallen Age Saga, which you can buy over on Amazon right now!