How to Create a Mood Board for your Character!
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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!
If you’re interested in working through creating characters and you want to learn more about the art of character design for books, then you should check out my ULTIMATE character creation workbook and guide. With over 150 pages of instructional content and interactive fillables, you can learn how to create a character from the foundation to the image and beyond.
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!
DIY the 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 just for a small creative side project and it can help you see your written ideas into picture form.
There are a lot of AI generators like MidJourney and Leonardo as well as ImageFX from Google and ChatGPT’s image creator. You can use whatever you want if you’re interested in it.
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. 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. Be aware that when using images from Pinterest and other websites that you don’t own the art so you shouldn’t sell the mood board because you are breaching copyright for the original artist.
Feel free to add quotes and other things to spruce up your mood board too!
Before you head on out, be sure to check out my series, The Fallen Age Saga, and don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter! This way, you can stay up to date on my new WIPs, works, posts, and get access to insights and EXCLUSIVE discount codes on shop products like my ULTIMATE character creation guide!
