Week 5 – Character Design

This week, we were taking a look at character design and how to come up with multiple concepts to work toward the final product. We were taught in blackboard lectures the essentials of building a good character and everything we had to think about to describe and explain how our character looks and works.

For me, character design has always been a huge challenge and ive never been able to create designs i feel happy or comfortable with. It took me a good four days to even think of types of characters i could make for this task, giving me quite a small window of time to finish it all.

My first character i came up with was a Ladybug mount. Since it was a mount, I decided to give it the behaviour of a horse as I later decided it was also going to be the steed of a warrior, so since horses are able to be ridden into battle, it’d fit well with the ladybug.

Whilst drawing and designing this character, like the rest, i did quite a lot of research. I wanted to first find out if there was a difference between the two genders, male and female, which there was, but i wouldn’t have been able to implement it in my design as they were microscopic differences. The only difference i could add was the paler and lighter colours on the male.  I used a site called Sciencing.com for this information – https://sciencing.com/difference-between-male-female-ladybugs-5978072.html

I also had to look up references of what a real ladybug looks like, subjecting myself to some images that made me highly uncomfortable like the underside of the ladybug. These images helped me with the overall form, colours and simple anatomy of a ladybug so i could better understand and express my character.

 





Seven Spot Ladybird (Coccinella septempunctata) with wing-case open, taking off from a Daffodil leaf. Suburban garden, Ashby de la Zouch, Leicestershire, UK, March.

For the posing, I also had to look up photos of a rearing horse so i could get as accurate a pose as possible. I tried using real horses, but they didn’t feel dramatic enough, so i used this stock image.

side view silhouette mustang design

 

My next character was the rider of the Ladybug. He’s got quite a lot of ties to Japanese and Chinese culture, as his weapons are based off historical weapons from these cultures. I also wanted to give him light armour with leaves as a blanket between him and the metal, keeping him warm, comfortable and to keep the armour from chafing his skin. This unintentionally gave him the light armoured look of Japanese warriors, tying back to the Japanese culture.

Since he had such a big part of Japanese culture in him, I decided to give him a Japanese name, pronounced Yuo-koh.

His head has a Toadstool mushroom growing from it, able to regrow if broken or damaged. Since Toadstools are usually flat, i decided to give it a bit more character and make it more of a triangular shape.

An interesting fact about him is that he is one of the few who are left handed.

WIP of Yuko’s expression sheet

My last character i designed was more so a companion character for the scientist. For this reason i wanted to give it a cat-like personality, making him curious, playful and always excited yet easily frightened or startled.

For his design I wanted to use a Crocus flower, as they look really pretty and i thought they looked quite playful too. They also have long stems, perfect for being able to fit a long body with two leaves for loose arms.

I  named him Wiggler as because he’s so happy and loves to wiggle, which came from a random doodle idea but i thought really fit his character. His method of movement is bouncing as he has no actual legs, but he can use his arms (leaves) and petals to communicate his emotions.

 Crocus flower bulbs

I also wanted to further touch on Yuko’s weapons and explain how they’re used and which is which. I haven’t given them names yet but the left weapon is based off of a Glaive and a Guandao, two very similar weapons. For the blade on top of the pole, i used a praying mantis as inspiration for the shape and type of blades, with the left side being a razor sharp blade used for slashing, and the right edge serrated blades with a serrated hook on the end. The overall colour of the weapon was also inspired by praying mantis colours.


As for the weapon on the right, it’s inspired from a Japanese Tanto knife, a knife which looks and acts like a mini katana in battle, as well as a grass-leaf (blade of grass) to fit the worlds theme. I decided to go with glass for the blade as it seemed to fit the world more, as they could find old bits of glass in the grass and refine it to forge new weapons from. The cloth would also be easily accessible too.

 

 

Week 4 – Colour pallet work

This week, we were told to go off and study colour pallets, themes and scripts.

For our first task, we had to take a thumbnail previously drawn from last weeks work and use a colour script to give it an emotional feel. I chose my thumbnail of a data farm, as i felt it suited the cyberpunk world and the story at the time. For colours I decided to go with a blue analogous colour pallet, as i felt it suited the mystery of my piece.


I was later given feedback about how I could improve this piece to give it more of the emotion i was trying to achieve. I was advised to make the lights glow more and the fluorescent lights on the ceiling to give off more of a glow effect themselves too.

Inspiration for my thumbnail:

Another task was to take 3 screenshots from animations and pick out their colour scripts. I was a little confused at first, even after listening to the lectures that were put up on blackboard, but soon got the hang of it.

I chose scenes from Disney movies, as they always have really well thought out colours that work well with each other, making it easier for me to understand and pick out the striking colours that are helping to tell the story and emotion of the scene and characters.

We also had to take a PNG of some line work that one of the lecturers had done and fill it in with a colour pallet to create a certain atmosphere.

For my first piece I went with a natural colour pallet for a sunset, giving a calming and welcoming look. Giving the rocks a more brown colour helped keep to a certain colour pallet and made the piece look softer and more welcoming. I tried to stick with blues, green, orange and yellows for this piece, topping it all off with an orange tint done by creating a layer above the rest, setting it to overlay and turning the opacity down.

 

For my second piece, i decided to go with something more sinister and give it an eerie atmosphere. I drew a monster peering over the horizon as if it were looking down on the planet. I gave it menacing red eyes to highlight the fact its a dangerous creature, and kept the colour pallet to a more vibrant set of pinks, blues and purples.

Week 3- tonal value

For our third week, we were moved to new groups and told to help them work on concepts and more thumbnails for their world. Me and Simas from group 6 got moved to group 7, where they’re planning on making a cyberpunk world. With this in mind, I straight away thought of bright lit city structures and Oni masks so I added them into my work.

A concept for the backstory of the world was a thief with a heart of gold who either steals food for the poor or steals a game cartridge for their younger brother who wants the game but cant find it anywhere. This is where my final thumbnail of the data farm came from. You can see the thief dimly lit in the back of the room at a console taking the game for their brother.

These thumbnails had to be done in black and white, as we were working on tonal values this week with black being the closest object and white being the farthest. Black also helps focus on the white which can help give a major focus point in the image.

A full illustration was also required for this homework, so I took the thumbnail which I thought was the most interesting and closely tied to the worlds backstory.

The image is a little messed up because the cropping didn’t work, but on the top image I added a layer of black over everything to make it seem more mysterious and interesting. But I put both of them here so you can see and compare the differences.

Inspirations:

Perspective and composition

This week, we had to draw 12 thumbnails thinking of composition with our current world in mind. I drew thumbnails relating to the Bioluminescence world i was currently in, trying to think of which creatures and features in the environment would be best suited off glowing and what the houses would look like in the different settlements.

It was a bit hard to continuously think of environments to draw out and how the tones would work, though sadly i forgot to do any lighting to show what was actually glowing, so i’d like to change this and remember it in the future.

For the second part of our work, we had to get 6 pictures from animations and find 3 one point perspectives and 3 2 point perspectives, then draw over the top of them to show the perspective lines.

for the 1 points, i mainly chose shots where the character was the main focus, and for 2 point, it was easiest to find either a room or a building which had a clear point from where to start and find the vanishing point.

Week 2 – Build A World

This week we were split into 9 groups and tasked to come up with ideas for designing a world. After piling together about 100 ideas and getting to know each other better, we came to a final decision of what we all wanted in the world, which was a little bit of everything.

We have radiation in the air resulting in mutated creatures, hostile and passive, who run around the traditional villages where people have less equipment to defend themselves with, making them easy targets. There’s also cities which are alike various areas of the world such as Japan, America, Europe and Africa, along with a bio-luminescent rain forest with exotic creatures who become more active in the night. All the cities around the world are protected by huge domes that are controlled by a special government funded force who can disable them at any given time in the state of an emergency. These cities are also very highly advanced in technology and everything is futuristic in these areas, with mechanical properties almost everywhere throughout the city and advanced medicine.

As for the creatures that live in the environment, most are mutated in either appearance, abilities or behaviour, (e.g. the mutated genes can make them more violent and lust for blood, or cause them to hallucinate) these could either aid the villages with things such as stronger and faster equines/mounts to carry out their tasks or pose bigger threats to the environment and economy with creatures such as the Nyxer, a canine which has been mutated to become a killing machine, often hunting in small packs. Aside from the creatures that play a big role in the world, there’s also creatures just floating about in the sky for atmosphere and beauty such as whales, sharks, eels, jellyfish and squid-like creatures called Gazers. Of course though, all these ideas are still just that, ideas. They’re all prone to change and even removal.

Above you’ll see the concepts I drew for some of the creatures, each are bio-luminescent and only the Nyxer is hostile, the other two are just creatures for atmosphere that float about the world.

For inspiration I used things such as the game Warframe and its new infested Deimos update including a canine like creature called a Kubrow which they reworked to give an infested look. The infested feline like creature, a Kavat, also helped me when thinking about the eyes and how they’d glow. I was also very interested in Anubis at this point, so the little part at the side of the face as well as the overall shape and look of the face was also inspired by Anubis alongside the infested Kubrow. See below for an example.

For other creature such as the shark and the eel I used more real life counterparts than creative ones such as a lemon shark and an electric eel and just gave them a kind of design I felt fitting, though for the shark I did have a sort of vaporwave design in mind with the neon blue lines on the black body.