We start with what already exists: design docs, competitor references, the two characters you like and the one you don't. If there's a live game, we play it. The output is a written brief naming the constraints, from target platform to animation plans to anything legal has flagged.
You'll get: a signed-off creative brief and a scoped estimate.
Character Art Services
You have a cast to build and a milestone that isn't moving. We staff character art against your dates and your style guide, for studios and publishers shipping on mobile, web, PC, and console.
Styles- Stylized
- Realistic
- Chibi
- Casual
- Pixel
- Mascot
Scope2D character design, concept art, turnarounds, model sheets
TermsFull IP transfer on delivery. NDA before work starts.
Character Art Services for Game Studios
A character carries more of your game's identity than any other asset. Players recognize a silhouette before they read a name, and they judge the whole product on it inside two seconds of a store screenshot. Our character art services cover that decision from the first sketch through to production-ready sheets.
Innovecs Games works with mid-size studios and publishers who already have a project in motion and need character design services that slot into it. Sometimes that's one hero design, sometimes a full roster of NPCs, enemies, and cosmetics across a live title.
The drawing is rarely the hard part. These three are:
Consistency.
Keeping fifty characters on-model after four art leads have touched the file.
Read at size.
A design that holds on a 6-inch screen, not just at 100% zoom.
Handoff.
Sheets a rigger can build from without coming back with questions.
We plan for all three from the brief onward, which is why our concept art services end in documentation and not just a finished render. Character work sits inside our wider game art services practice, so one studio also covers environments, UI, and technical art.
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Character Art Portfolio Highlights
Casual mascots, hero designs, match-3 casts, simulation wildlife. Filter by style or platform, or open a project to see how the design got there.
Our Character Art Services
Six ways studios buy character design services from us. Most projects start with one and expand once the style is locked.
2D Character Concept Art
Concept work is where the expensive mistakes get made cheaply. Our concept art services start wide, with silhouettes and thumbnails that test tonal range before anyone commits to a palette or a costume. You see three to five distinct directions, not one polished guess, and the round where you kill two of them is the round that saves the schedule.
Character Design & Iteration
A first pass that looks great in isolation often falls apart next to the rest of the cast. Iteration is where that gets fixed: proportion against existing characters, costume readability at target resolution, expression range for the animations you plan to build. Game character design feedback goes through a single art director on our side, so revisions don't arrive from four inboxes.
Character Turnarounds & Model Sheets
Animators and riggers need more than a hero render. We deliver front, side, three-quarter, and back views at matched proportion, plus expression sheets, prop callouts, and construction notes. If the character is heading into a 3D pipeline, the turnaround is built to that spec from the start.
Stylized & Realistic Character Art
Stylized and realistic character art fail in different ways: stylized breaks when exaggeration drifts across a cast, realistic breaks on anatomy and material believability. A painterly fantasy roster and a grounded military cast go to different hands, and both pass the same art direction review.
Mascot & Marketing Character Art
A mascot has a different job than an in-game character. It has to survive an app icon at 60 pixels, a store banner, and a UA video, often in the same week. We design for that range and deliver the pose library your marketing team will ask for later, alongside our game marketing art team.
Character Art for Mobile & Casual Games
Mobile constraints don't transfer from PC. Shorter read distance, tighter asset budgets, a UI that eats a third of the screen. Casual audiences read appeal faster than detail, so we push silhouette and color over rendering density. Most of our shipped character work is mobile.
Tools & Creative Capabilities
The craft side of the work: what we paint in, how a style gets locked, and where AI actually helps.
Digital Painting & Illustration Pipeline
Photoshop and Procreate for painting, vector art for scalable mascot and UI work, pixel tools where the project calls for it. Files arrive layered and named to a convention we agree on in week one, never flattened with no way back in.
Style Development & Art Direction
Before production scales, we build a style bible: line weight, palette rules, proportion system, material logic, edge cases. It's what lets a second artist join in month three without the cast drifting. One named art director owns it and reviews against it.
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AI in Character Art Production
Every art vendor now says it uses AI. Fewer say where.
Where we use it
AI-assisted concept iteration at the exploration stage, and nowhere else. Generative reference art lets an artist test twelve silhouette directions in the time it took to draw four.
Where we don't
No AI output ships as a deliverable. Not in approved concepts, not in turnarounds, not in final art. Generated imagery carries unresolved rights questions, and you're buying assets you need to own.
Who's accountable.
A human-led, AI-augmented workflow means an artist and an art director sign off on every asset that reaches you. AI has no judgment about whether a character reads as trustworthy or menacing at a glance, and that is most of the job.
How We Create Game Characters
Six stages. The shape of our game character design process holds for a single hero design and a forty-character roster alike; what changes is how many rounds sit inside stage three.
Concept Sketches & Style Exploration
Silhouettes and rough thumbnails, spread across genuinely distinct directions rather than variations on one. This is where AI-powered style exploration earns its place, widening the reference set before an artist commits hours. You pick the direction, and we say so if we think one of them is a trap.
You'll get: 3 to 5 distinct directions, one of them locked.
Character Design & Iteration
The locked direction goes to full design: costume, props, palette, expression range, and how the character sits beside the rest of the cast. Revision rounds are agreed in writing before this stage starts, so nobody negotiates scope mid-sprint. Most of the value in video game character design gets decided here, not in the final render.
You'll get: approved designs, with the agreed revision rounds used.
Turnarounds & Model Sheets
Every view, expression, and prop callout an animator needs, drawn at consistent proportion and scale so nothing has to be corrected in rig. Where the geometry is unusual, construction notes come with it. If a rigging or 3D team sits downstream, they review the sheet before we call it done.
You'll get: full turnarounds, model sheets, layered sources.
Final Delivery & Style Guide
Final art in the formats your pipeline uses, plus the style guide that lets anyone extend the cast later without rebriefing from scratch. Sources, documentation, and rights all move to you in the same handoff.
You'll get: production files, style bible, signed IP transfer.
Ongoing Art Support
Live games keep needing characters: seasonal skins, event NPCs, collaboration crossovers. Teams that stay past the first delivery usually move to a dedicated art team on a monthly allocation, which costs less than restarting a briefing cycle every quarter.
You'll get: a standing team and agreed monthly capacity.
Character Art Styles We Cover
Style choice shapes what character design services cost and how long they take, and each carries its own ways to go wrong.
Stylized
Exaggeration has to be consistent, not just appealing, so we set how far proportions push before anyone draws the second character.
Realistic
Anatomy and material believability carry the whole read. Slower, more reference-driven, least tolerant of a junior pass.
Chibi and cute
Chibi character art lives on head-to-body ratio and expression clarity. Detail actively hurts it at small sizes.
Pixel art
Every pixel is a decision and the palette is the design. Quick to look at, slow to do well.
Mascot
Built for the icon first and everything else second. If it doesn't read at 60 pixels, the rest doesn't matter.
Casual mobile
Casual character art competes in a store grid before it competes inside a game, which puts silhouette and color separation ahead of detail.
Why Choose Innovecs Games
Plenty of studios can draw. Fewer can hold a cast consistent across two years of live ops, staff against your dates, and hand you clean files at the end. That's where a character design company is actually judged.
Ready to Build Your Characters to Life? Let's Talk.
If you have a brief, send it. If you have a moodboard and a deadline, send that. Either way our character art services team comes back with a scoped team, a timeline, and an honest read on the style you're chasing.
What Our Clients Say
Art directors and studio heads who have run art and production with our team.
Partnering with Innovecs has been a great benefit to our team and project. The work they produce for us is always on time, within budget, and of the highest quality! Innovecs has made a positive impact with us!
Shane Nakamura
Art Director at Jam City
When looking to outsource art assets for some of our projects I was fortunate to sign with Innovecs. I remembered them as easy to co-work with, they weren’t afraid to take our challenges and delivered top-notch content.
Artem Nabatov
Head of Studio at Gameloft
I value the professionalism and the commitment of Innovecs as a company and the developers I personally got to work with. The human resources are of the highest quality. I definitely plan to work with them again and increase the capacity of cooperation in the future.
Shahar Sorek
Founder and CEO at 7 Elements Studios
Related Services
Character art rarely ships alone. These are the teams it most often runs beside.
FAQ
What does character art services include?
Concept sketches, silhouette exploration, full character design, turnarounds, model sheets, expression sheets, and the style guide that holds a cast together. Most engagements also cover mascot and marketing variants. Scope stops where rigging and animation begin, though we build the sheets to those teams' spec.
How long does it take to create a full set of game character art?
Cast size and how settled your style is drive it. A single hero with turnarounds typically runs two to four weeks including revisions. A roster of ten to fifteen, starting from an undefined style, is closer to two or three months, with the first weeks going into style development that speeds up everything after.
What is the typical cost of character art services?
There's no rate card, because a chibi mobile NPC and a realistic hero with full sheets aren't the same purchase. Cost tracks cast size, style complexity, deliverable depth, and revision rounds. Send a brief, or even a rough list of characters, and we come back with a scoped estimate. Revisions are priced up front so the number doesn't move mid-project.
Which art styles can Innovecs Games deliver?
Stylized, realistic, chibi, casual mobile, pixel art, and mascot design, across fantasy, sci-fi, historical, and contemporary settings. Video game character design gets assigned by style specialization, not by who is free that week. If a style falls outside what we do well, we'd rather say so than take the project.
Do you provide character turnarounds and model sheets for animation teams?
Yes, and it's one of the more common briefs we get. If your rigging or animation team has a spec, we build to that spec rather than to a house template, and they review the sheet before delivery instead of after. Where no spec exists yet, we propose one and you sign it off alongside the brief.
Can you match an existing game's art style?
A large share of our work, usually when a studio needs to extend a cast without the new characters looking imported. A paid test round comes first, so you judge the match before committing to full scope. Reverse-engineering the rules behind a style, rather than copying its surface, is what makes it hold across twenty more characters.
What platforms and genres do you create character art for?
Mobile is the bulk of it: match-3, puzzle, casual sim, and hyper-casual. We also work on PC and console, including mid-core and AAA support through the wider studio. A console RPG cast and a mobile puzzle cast are different design problems even in the same style.
How do you ensure character designs stay consistent across a game?
A style bible written in the first weeks, and one named art director who reviews every asset against it. It covers proportion systems, palette rules, line weight, material logic, and the edge cases where artists diverge. New artists onboard against that document, not against existing art. You get the bible on delivery, so consistency survives after we're done.
How is AI used in character art production?
At the exploration stage, and nowhere else. AI-assisted concept iteration and generative reference art let an artist test far more directions in the first days than manual sketching allows. Nothing generated goes into a deliverable, and no client asset or brief trains anything. Every line you receive was drawn and approved by a person.
Can AI generate game-ready character art on its own?
No. It produces images, not production assets. Consistent turnarounds of the same character, correct proportion across a cast, layered files, and rights you can own are all outside what current generative tools deliver reliably. Ownership alone matters once a character becomes your franchise. AI shortens the front of the process; it doesn't replace the people running it.
Get in Touch
We usually reply within one or two business days.
Nader Alikhani
VP of Innovecs Games
Christopher Rowe
Business Development Director
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