Create and Sell Your Own Adoptable Characters!

Create your Own Adoptables

If you are at all familiar with adoptable characters, you may be inspired to create some of your own awesome adoptable designs! This process begins with designing and planning your adoptable. You can then sell your adopts online and build a community around their designs.

Designing your Adopt

The first step of coming up with a design is finding inspiration. Maybe you want to create an adoptable from a popular fandom like Pokemon or Steven Universe. You can also try combining different themes or elements, like animals and foods, into something new. There are an infinite number of ways to find inspiration for characters, from everyday objects to randomly generated prompts from sites like ARTPROMPTS.  

Here's an example of some adoptables inspired by the world of Steven Universe made by Twitter artist TH3DIC3BAB3.

This artist created their own character designs based on the show by mixing multiple gems together, and also developed a clear pricing structure which highlights the different traits that make up each character.

Combining unrelated elements together in general is a wonderful way to come up with simple adopt ideas. It can be great to use a combination of two or three strong themes to make a cohesive and unique design!

The Three Emoji Challenge is something many artists participate in on social media as a way of practicing character design, and can lead to some interesting adopts! Here's an awesome prompt generator you can use to play around with the emoji challenge, or you can even reach out to your friends and followers online for random emoji combinations!

You can also try to find a character base to use for designing your adopts.  Many artists offer free or pay-to-use bases for others to use, and also sell designs made on their own bases. This base is a template file you can then draw on and edit to turn into a new design. Here's a really great free base from the artist Maddox to try out!

Decide What to Do with Your New Adopt

Once you have your adopt design ready, you'll probably want to show it off! You can choose to sell your adopt or keep it to interact as part of a larger community.  

If you choose to sell it, there are a few ways people commonly structure their sales that may be good to try! It's important to find what works for you, and allows you to value yourself and the work that you put into the piece.

Selling Your Adopt

Auction - Many artists, like the character artist Pippo, host an auction with specific rules to sell their adopts. In this Tweet below, Pippo has even created a custom graphic with their terms and conditions for a character sale.

When hosting an auction, people generally include these tiers for customers:

SB - Starting Bid

AB - Auto Buy / Asking Bid

MI - Minimum Bid Increase

Offer or Bio to Adopt - When someone puts a character up for offer, but not necessarily auction. Usually the person listing the adopt will say what they will and won't accept, like USD or a custom art piece, and lists what they want in order of priority. Check out this example of a Halloween canine adopt from the artist Wreckham below! They list out rules and everything that comes with the purchase clearly.

Big Batch Sale - This is when an artist sells a giant batch of adoptables at once, usually all drawn on the same base. This allows an artist to create a variety of designs while still maintaining a consistent look. The adopt artist GolddTeethh_ has an example of a big batch sale featured below. Each character is numbered for their Gacha Mystery sale, and they provide a Google form for keeping track of each adopt! Be sure to check out their Twitter thread for more info on their amazing sale and the designs they have created!