This week we focussed on character design.
The first thing I did carries on from last week, I was out in B&Q and found these paint swatches and picked some out that I thought would work for the world’s environment or characters.
Then I went and watched some videos on breaking down characters and how to start working on concept character sketches- since I already briefly explored the general design of my characters before I knew what I wanted my characters to look like and I wanted to build on this in a more professional and thorough way ( I watched some of Kienan Lafferty ‘s Concept Art BOOT CAMP, Subjectively‘s DESIGNING A CHARACTER, moderndayjames‘s CHARACTER DESIGN 1: THUMBNAILING and Ctrl+Paint‘s Digital Painting- Modular Thumbnail Sketching), these were invaluable in learning how to approach my character sheets with thought, especially when comparing it to my past explorations.
I went and made a written plan to just flesh out what I thought my characters were like and who they are to try and be able to know exactly who they are as if they were real. With this all written out I can get the personality and style of my character that will introduce how I draw them.
DEMON
HUMAN
Then I started applying what I learned from the tutorial videos and started making some character exploration pages in procreate. For these you can see I broke my characters down into 3 things: their archetype, trope and the spin, as well as collecting many references that I thought had elements that I could use. For the first page I was focussing on the form, exploring the overall big picture instead of the details (looking at shape language and proportions). The second page I went and explored the different details I could put on the character and the different variations, for the demon I mainly used lots of animal references for the teeth, the horns and the tails and this is because while we as a group decided on having a more relatable, human form I still want to feature the beastly, animalistic side that comes with demons and devils. The final page of my demon shows references that I thought fit, as well as a drawing Tori made and some of her references that I used to start thinking of different ways to join our ideas together (and explore things I hadn’t considered during my initial exploration too).
With these completed I wanted to explore my characters more, so I made a quick hand exploration as well and I did these on the same page to contrast the different in lengths and colour between the characters (I knew I wanted a moment in the animation where they hold hands). I also made some quick animation tests of the characters to start thinking about introducing personality to these still images, these are super rough but you can understand the main action from them and I can start to identify what types of movements I will have to study to be able to animate them correctly ( like the wing movements and gestures).
I learnt a lot from this week’s work and I will continue to work on my character designing skills going forward.