Japanese app brings characters to life

Picrew is a free app that allows writers to draw upon thousands of artist-created images to bring their character creations to life.

Have you ever created your own character? Have you ever had a hard time visualizing said character? Then this app is for you.

Picrew is an online character creator. It allows users to customize their own characters from hairstyles to eye colors. With thousands of different combinations and many more different art styles, anything is possible. Using any one of their many templates offered on their site, users can create any characters imaginable.

Not only does Picrew have several thousand choices when creating characters of choice, but these are also all offered for free. Occasionally the artists will include a link to a tip jar or another option to give them some support for their hard work providing these templates. But users do not have to spend money on anything unless they want to support the artists.

This app is convenient and fun. With several different template options and art styles, any characters users want to create are possible. There’s even a randomizer button users can click in order to experiment with the design and get some different ideas that they might not have thought of before, providing an exciting art experience.

A setback with this app is that it is only offered in Japanese. That can make it a bit difficult when going from template to template, but once users get used to the layout, it gets easier to navigate the rest of the site. Another setback would probably be more of a problem for the artists with templates on the app, which would be that there are rarely any watermarks. That may sound good to those who aren’t too fond of watermarks, but it can actually be bad for the artist in several ways. 

One way that it can cause problems is that some people choose to post their created character on social media and exclude the artists’ names and/or usernames. This is indirectly taking credit for the artwork, which is not a kind thing to do.

Though the app might be convenient to those character creators out there, try to keep in mind that an artist took the time to create these templates for the user to use. If users can take the time to create characters on an online template, take the time to credit the artists as well.

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