This week our homework was to fill 2 or more pages of different character design ideas, whilst considering the fundamentals covered over the past several weeks (shape, from, colour…). Along with our lecture this week covering this topic, I also found reading up on character design and looking for examples from different artist helped me get started with my own designs. I read various ‘The Art of’ Disney books which was very useful. I have The Art of Up, Brave, Soul, Coco and Tangled, and looking through the different steps taken when designing characters for these animations helped me gain more confidence as I knew where to start with my sketches.
The current theme for my group is a magical academia world where a fungus begins to spread, infecting the magical school near the forest where the fungus began, turning the pupils and teachers into mushroom people. Sorcha, who was our guest lecturer this week, helped breakdown these ideas and characters for us which was extremely helpful. At the beginning of the week, I kept my sketches extremely basic, only using circles and triangles to design my mushroom characters as I wanted their whole bodies to resemble mushrooms in the beginning. I looked at mushroom images as my references.
As the week went on, my group decided to focus on creating taller and slimmer bodies as we wanted them to look more like zombies with mushroom features rather than complete mushrooms. I continued using actual mushrooms as my references whilst making the bodies look more humanlike to fit the theme of the animation.
Looking at the shapes of the mushrooms, I noticed that the bottom of the stalk was often much larger than the top. I decided to keep this in my designs by making the bottom half of the legs larger than the top half, so even though the bodies now are more humanlike, they still have shapes similar to mushrooms throughout them, rather than the head being the only mushroom-like element. At this point, I also researched how fungal infections spread so I could design a more realistic character. Through my research, I found out that fungal infections spread through skin to skin contact, or through infections in soil. Because of this, I tried to incorporate long, thin fingers in my designs so the zombies could grip people easier, causing the spread of the fungus. Also because of this research, we decided to have a zombie coming out of the ground at the beginning of the animation, which is the start of the spread.
Research:
Designs:
I also read a couple chapters of ‘The Silver Way’ by Stephen Silver this week. Already I have learned so much from this book as it has taught me to loosen up more with my sketches. I found the exercises in the book extremely enjoyable and useful. I plan on continuing reading this book next week as I start to add more details to my characters as I want to learn more about gestures and what to avoid when designing a face. We also had a character design workshop this week where Sorcha explained many topics in ‘The Silver Way’ such as rhythm and avoiding a stiff, even ladder when designing a character which I found very interesting.
These are two exercises from ‘The Silver Way’. Here I created 12 different thumbnails, splitting the bodies into very simple sections to find a body shape that I liked the most. I only took around 10-20 seconds on each thumbnail so that I didn’t overthink the designs and I could create them more freely and loosely.
Here I did the ‘zone-out’ exercise where I had to blur my eyes and draw with my left hand to create a rough sketch of a character, I then added detail from there. I found this difficult at first however I am very happy with the result and will be trying this again in the future.
References used:
Week 6:
As we did not have class this week, I decided to spend my time drawing a character design sheet for the main mushroom zombie of our animation, the old Principal. We did not end up going with this design as we decided to make him look more human-like, therefore his skin would look less green and instead of having a mushroom shaped head, the mushrooms now grow and appear on his skin. I am still, however, extremely proud of my design and am happy the others thought some elements would look good in our animation, such as his pale, white eyes, which were inspired by the zombies from the walking dead video game.
My design:
References:
