This was by far the class I was most excited about as, I’m sure like most other people in the class, I love character design.
This lecture taught me to be aware of shape language and using it to convey the emotion I want to the audience. It also taught me to think purposefully about my design and to have clear reasons and justifications for why I have designed something in a certain way. We were also taught that experimenting with proportions is very important to create appeal for the audience. To practice shape language and varying proportions we were tasked with creating characters from blobs.
We were then tasked with essentially making caricatures of people to further examine shape language and proportion.
As I wasn’t able to attend class this day, someone in my group posted a summary of what they had talked about during the lesson and what factions could exist in our world. My group had fleshed out the idea of a celtic post-apocalypse and had settled on the idea that there would be a fungus/virus similar to The Last of Us which would be very painful to live with. Because of this, if someone’s body part got infected, they would have to amputate it and replace it with a prosthetic/bionic one, they would also do this for animals as many people have an innate connection to animals. There were also mentions of a steampunk aesthetic which I was immediately drawn to as I am a fan of shows which embrace this aesthetic such as Arcane. My group had also thought of the different factions that might exist, one of which being Burners. This is a group which would take it into their own hands to destroy the fungus by trying to burn it away. I was intrigued by this idea so I decided this would be the best group to design a character for.
To begin with, I gathered photos as reference. The first character which came to mind when I heard of this idea was predictably Pyro from Team Fortress 2 so I used him as a kind of base for my designs. I also gathered reference of steampunk gas masks and outfits, however I also didn’t want the outfits to be fancy as I imagined the Burners to be poorer people in society who were trying to protect their communities from this virus as others would not.
I came up with these 4 initial concepts keeping in mind to attempt different proportions and shapes in my designs and begining with silhouettes and adding details afterwards to get a sense of the shape language.
I was conflicted when deciding on which design of the 4 that I should chose to further develop as I liked the 2 designs on the left equally. However, I ultimately decided that the top left design better conveyed the imposing and intimidating feeling that I was going for due to it’s more square shape language and larger proportions. I wanted to portray the sense that these people would appear to be very intimidating and would technically be in opposition to the nature focused morality of others in society due to the use of fire which would destroy animal habitats, however they were also protectors of the community in trying to destroy the virus. I then came up with 2 other variations of the design, playing with proportions and placement of different elements. I disliked giving my character a flamethrower prop and felt it cluttered the design so I decided to try attaching the prosthetic arm of my other design onto this character. I felt this design would be more fitting as it makes sense that a character might have a prosthetic that is suited to a certain task to be more practical. I also moved the oxygen tank to the bottom half of the character as I felt that also having it on the top would make the character too top heavy and I wanted the mechanical arm to be what stood out about the design. However, in hindsight I feel that this decision may have made the design a bit cluttered.
When finalising my design I decided to look at references of steampunk prosthetics to see what design motifs help to convey the steampunk aesthetic. I also looked at references of flamethrowers as I wanted my prosthetic arm to be used as one. I used the steampunk prosthetics of Arcane as a huge inspiration for this design. After picking out the key aspects of each object, I examined how I could combine them to get the appearance of my final design while making the function clear to the viewer.
When deciding on a colour palette I took into account the dreary atmosphere of the world so I decided on dull colours. I also used a warmer colour palette to visually convey the character’s connotations with fire. I also chose this palette as I wanted the arm to be built from common metal like copper and iron to imply that the arm has possibly been cobbled together by the character themselves.
I am very pleased overall with how my design has turned out and I feel that it accurately conveys what I wanted to get across. I also have learned from this assignment to always use references as I tend to try and draw things from imagination only. I have also learned the importance of doing multiple concepts before arriving on a final one.