For this assignment, we’ve been tasked to create and design a character, complete with a backstory, i had quite a bit of fun with this task and attempted to create two character designs connecting backstories
Character design
Early pencil concepts
I started off by drawing in various different styles and methods just to see what I’d be happy with when it came to designing the character.
I soon settled on a style inspired by Genndy Tartakovsky’s style of illustration, that being simplistic anatomy, thin outlines and blocked colours to make up the character, I thought this would be the best style to use as it would easily save time as well as being a nice style of animation. with this decision I went on to develop my first character, Vinn, a Mexican vigilante who lives in a world of mythology and corruption, his city has been taken over by a tyrannical kingpin and now he fights to free it.
VINN
the first initial sketch of Vinn
A small sketch up of various emotional looks
a few sketches of various arm and hand poses Vinn could have as well as I small body pose sketch
A full body layout sketch
I also did a small digital headshot of Vinn for a more cleaner idea of what he’d look like
(Miles Ignacio) El Infiernos
before becoming the towering kingpin, Miles Ignacio was just a back ally criminal before meeting his quick demise, though he was given a second chance from one of the many demons of hell, now he rules over his city as a powerful demonic tyrant, now known as El Infiernos
My first initial quick sketch up of Miles, I was heavily inspired by the character Aku from Samurai Jack
I then devolved a much more expressive headshot of the character.
I worked on a rough sketch of what Mile’s Demonic body may look like, I continued to develop this on both paper and digital.
As I continued developing the character, I decided to take inspiration from Aztec Mythology, such as colour schemes and various bits of clothing that they wore in those times.
A small sketch up of a Aztec headdress that I considered using on Miles
when approaching the final design for Miles, I decided to give a major design to change to Miles head, going on with the Aztec inspirations, I gave him a feathered headdress, as well as that I also changed his design to a skull, as i felt the initial design was too similar to Aku, I also thought it might suit better that he would have no skin given that he has the demonic ability to manipulate fire
The final digital Illustration of Miles.
Stop Motion
as well as character design, we also had to experiment with simple stop motion animation, these are to basic clips of how movement would work using stop motion (click the images to access the stop motion Gif)
