Accessories for Characters Wheel

Where does the eye go on a character? Usually the head, and usually because that is where every accessory ended up. SpinyWheel's Accessories for Characters Wheel spins 42 items at 2.4 percent each, sending them to places you would not have chosen.

The wheel is sorted by object, but design works by zone

What an accessory is matters less than where it sits. Grouping the list by body zone shows how the odds actually fall:

Head and hair carry nine entries, from beanies and crowns to clips, bands, bows, and scrunchies. Legs and feet carry three. That imbalance mirrors how most people design: the face is the interesting part, so everything migrates upward and the lower half of a character goes bare.

A spin that sends you to anklets or stockings is doing the thing a wheel is for. It puts weight somewhere your instincts never place it, and a design with something happening below the waist reads as a fuller person rather than a portrait with legs attached.

Silhouette first, detail second

An accessory either changes the outline of a character or it does not, and that distinction predicts how much work it will do at a glance.

Shawls, backpacks, umbrellas, and suspenders alter the silhouette, which means they read from across a room and at thumbnail size. Rings, pins, brooches, and keychains do not, so they only exist for a viewer who is already close enough to look. Both are useful. Loading a character with six detail items and no silhouette change produces a design that vanishes when scaled down, which is exactly what happens on a character select screen or a phone.

Spin twice and check what you got. If both results are detail items, the character needs something structural before either of them matters.

Accessories carry information clothing does not

A jacket says a character got dressed. A plushie says something considerably more specific, and so does a watch, a keychain, or a scrunchie left on a wrist.

The strong entries on this list are the ones that imply a habit or a history. An apron means work. A purse and a handbag imply different lives despite doing the same job. Muffs imply cold that a scarf does not, since nobody owns muffs casually. Being handed an item you would never have picked forces the question of why this character owns it, and answering that usually improves the character rather than only the drawing.

The awkward results are worth sitting with for a minute before rejecting. Suspenders on a character you imagined in a hoodie is either wrong or the most interesting thing about them, and you cannot tell which without trying it.

Tuning the wheel to your work

Forty-two is a broad starting set, and most artists will want to reshape it. Weights do that without deleting anything: entering 3, Stockings triples the odds on the zones you neglect, and weighting the head-and-hair entries down to 1 stops the wheel repeating what you already do.

That approach beats trimming, because the occasional unsuitable item is most of the reason to spin rather than choose. Deleting everything that does not fit your style leaves a list that only confirms your existing habits.

SpinyWheel's Dual Wheel returns two results in one landing, so an item and a color arrive together. Forty-two entries against twelve colors give 504 combinations. The 12 Colors Wheel covers the palette, the 100 Drawing Ideas Wheel supplies a subject, and the Aa — Race Wheel decides what the character is before you dress it.