Posted on 2. July 2026.
Originally posted on 2. July 2026 on Discord.
hello ladies, gentlemen and everyone else and welcome to day 12 of milkas' expression corner !!>
today i'll be talking about how to turn any character into an angry birds character !!
as examples, i'll be using 4 characters suggested to me: blu (from puzzleheads), sonic the hedgehog, heavy weapons guy (from team fortress 2), and arch-vile (from doom) !!
the first example i'll be using is blu.
the first step to making an angry birds character out of something else is always to figure out what the most important parts of its design are, as well as its most important facial features !!
for blu, his most important parts are the big round head and big square glasses, which also happen to count as facial features (yes the glasses count as well, they're facial accessories.)
so that means making the blu bird (not to be confused with the blue birds jim jake and jay, nor the bird "blu" from angry birds rio :P ) a big round blue body, as well as big square white glasses
he doesn't have any notable eyebrows though he does have eyebrows in general, usually depicted with one simple line so i chose to do the same thing. stella has similar eyebrows as well, so it's not entirely out of the picture for an angry bird to have such brows.
then come the angry bird specific traits: body markings and head and tail feathers.
blu's entire thing is being a single color on a fundamental level, so i decided to give him no body markings. as for the head feathers, i decided to take a look at his outfit for a moment - after all, you don't JUST have to look at the head of a character to make an angry bird, it just usually tends to be that the head ends up working best, though for elements like these it helps to pull from other parts of the design that usually aren't represented by the head alone, so i chose to turn blu's little collar tie thing into 2 square white head feathers. for his tail, i just did a little bunny tail because that's just a small circle so it fits.
then comes the part you have to be the most creative with: the beak. for blu, he just has a regular mouth so i chose to do a regular beak - it fits the character pretty well also. though i did choose to curve it at the tip, to help it fit the rounded design a bit better, as well as giving him a circular bottom beak.
that's all for blu! the result is a character that looks like blu, but also fits the theming of an angry bird. it fits the style while also not looking like one of the main angry birds cast members playing dress-up, as a lot of attempts at such a thing tend to do.
now, let's talk about the heavy weapons guy. heavy is a character from team fortress 2, which is a team based shooter game. the red team heavy and the blu team heavy look identical, but they're also enemies who despise each other. a question you often have to ask yourself when making a thing like this is, do i want my character to be a bird, or do i want it to be a pig? for a game such as team fortress 2, for example, it fits to have one team's mercenaries be birds and the other's pigs! that poses a dilemma, and it really all depends on what context you want to paint the character in, or how you want to use the character - hell, at the end of the day it probably only really depends on your personal choice!
i decided to do both just to show what it looks like, but i'm not gonna be talking about piggies today! that's a whole other thing to get into.
for the heavy bird, it was actually relatively easy to pinpoint some things for recognizability: his head shape is approximately that of an upside down trapezoid or an egg shape, which is pretty easy to work with in the angry birds style given that matilda is egg shaped already. he has a bald head and no eyebrows, which for me meant that in the birdified version i ditched those entirely, he has a long nose which for me meant a long beak, and a shaved beard, which i decided to be a little creative with and turn into colored belly feathers! usually whenever a character has something on their chin, neck, or torso, it can translate pretty well into a belly pattern. for his tail i looked again at the rest of his body, and decided to pick another recognizable trait of heavy's that is underrepresented in this design, that being his bullets! thouugh it's pretty vague, the 5 spiky tail feathers are meant to represent his bullets. not really a strong connection, but it always helps to have at least SOME reasoning behind your choices - the less arbitrary, the better! which is also what i did for his beak - there weren't many notable traits for me to pull from, but i did notice the stupid grin he's doing in the reference image i used - come to think of it, he does smile like that somewhat often, so i tried doing something like that for his beak as well!
compare the heavy bird to the heavy pig, and you'll see that most traits are the same given that i'm working with the exact same character - bald head, long nose, no eyebrows, fat trapezoid/egg shaped body, it all lines up and they look pretty similar!
now, let's look at sonic for a moment. (i will note that i have always had trouble making art of sonic, so these look pretty ugly for my standards. sonic was the suggested character, don't blame me!)
going back to the question of species, sonic's whole thing is being a hedgehog. so why does he have to be a bird or a pig? what if he stayed a hedgehog?
this is an entirely fair thing to do - sometimes, a character is best represented by staying the species they already are. for some, there are obscure references to pull from to find out what they would look like in the style. no hedgehogs for angry birds though!
this does however leave a lot more room for interpretation - if sonic really were in angry birds, he could look exactly like he already does for all we know! for such an example, it's best to look at what the style does in general, and try to average things out. though sonic is also an example of how that can be tricky - sonic is a very stylized character by design! his big conjoined eyes are simply something that does not happen in angry birds, yet is a crucial part of his design that can't be ignored, so there has to be some sort of middle ground, which i did by simply removing the line between the eyes.
he doesn't really have defined eyebrows either - i had to pull out the same thing i did for the heavy! all in all, by the end, this design doesn't really scream "angry birds" - since sonic is such a stylized character, there's not a lot of room for stylization in the angry birds department, especially given that there are no hedgehogs to reference for this to wittle down what needs to be stylized!
given that he's so stylized and needs a bit more of a grounded species to work with, what CAN you do with him? you COULD go with the "hog" in "hedgehog", but pigs are a bit more strict to work with than birds, and sonic is defined by his stylized quirks, so a bird seems like a better fit!
his big bulging eyes can still be somewhat done, his muzzle can be turned into a belly pattern, or a long beak - or how about both! the snout can be represented by a curved tip of the beak, which essentially just means he has the same beak as melody. the quills can be brought over exactly how they are, and that's kind of a sonic bird! (though admittedly i did not do very good in practice, again i am not good at making art of sonic the hedgehog specifically. i don't know why.)
moving on to our next example, the arch-vile !! now, the arch-vile is a really tricky one.
first things first, what species would work best? perhaps a pig? maybe, but there's so many intricacies and details, it really feels like keeping him a head-only version of the same species works best. not that the angry birds universe doesn't have characters with bodies - in fact, it's full of them! the whole thing about the angry birds and bad piggies is that they stand out in a world that is pretty much just like ours! however, with a character such as this, you also have to think about the fact you're not just porting the character into the angry birds artstyle, you're turning it into an angry birds VERSION of the character, so the body most likely has to go.
next step - what the hell are the main characteristics of this whole mess?! what do i do with all of this? well, again, the main thing is to look at what stands out most - with a character such as the arch-vile, you REALLY have to bring it down to basics and not overcomplicate.
a large veiny cranium, soulless white eyes, weird creepy mouth with weird creepy teeth, no eyebrows, no nose (or weird nose? hard to tell), and the weird tube things coming out of the side of its mouth
when you boil it down like that, it's really not that hard anymore. in fact, all of these things are pretty easy to stylize !! it even ended up sharing a lot of traits with the piggies, such as the mouth looking the same as it does on the pigs and the eyes having colored outlines.
there's not really a lot to even talk about regarding this: it's a pretty simple design when boiled down to these simple factors, even if the execution on the original seems overcomplicated to invoke the scary monster design!
and the last thing i wanted to touch on is finding good references. of course you must find a good, preferrably fullbody ref so you can pick and choose which details to add instead of only ever looking at the head, but it also helps to find a good ref of a character or characters from angry birds which share some traits with the character you're trying to make!
it helps to see what those traits would look like, just beware to not make the characters too similar - way too often i see people trying to make angry birds characters, only to make them too similar to an existing character, most often a member of the original cast. try to make them look a little different, bring over more of their unique traits and try to make them fit into the style! stylization is fun.
and that's all i have for today! hope you all learned something from this, have fun creating your own characters in the future !!
"and if i change myself can i still stay me,
or did i just change my mind?"
(quote from will wood's song, "Ish")