This week, I spent more time finalising my character designs. What interested me the most about Tartakovsky’s work is the shapes that each characters have, and I looked towards the various characters in Hotel Transylvania for reference. When thinking of characters, I wanted to try and draw up a variety of different personalities utilising various different shapes to convey different aesthetics. For a larger, lankier character, I would reference Dracula and the other broader characters in the franchise.

I knew I wanted to go for a humanoid sort of character as I found them to be the most interesting in Hotel Transylvania. I took what I learned from dissecting the body language of Genndy Tartakovsky’s work, and I created some sketches for character concepts. I had the idea of a skater zombie teenager where his prop would be a Walkman with headphones. I also had a porcelain doll concept where her prop would be a hairbrush. I tried to keep these in Tartakovsky’s style by giving them clearly defined body shapes, like smooth edges or sharp corners.

I took this knowledge and applied it to my following character designs. I created a demon porter girl utilising exaggerated body shapes of triangles and circles, taking reference from Mavis and the female mummy. For the wolf, I looked at the lankier and broader designs from the other monsters such as Frank and Wayne Werewolf to create an intimidating werewolf bartender. For the siren, I looked at Mavis’ mother to create long dragging features to emulate a moody, melancholic feel for her character.

I decided that the two designs I liked the most were the demon porter and the werewolf. I was considering further developing the mermaid but I felt as if she was quite boring and did not really fit the brief as much as the other two. I couldn’t really think of an occupation for her to have or reasoning as to why she would fit inside of a Hotel Transylvania film, so I decided to further expand on the other two designs as I liked them more visually and felt as if they fit the brief more.

 

Wolf Design

 

 

For the wolf design I made last week, I really liked the broad shape of his body. After feedback from Rachel, I experimented with mixing proportions, and tried extending the legs and making him lankier to give off a more cartoonish feel. I really liked this because I felt as if the looming body shape fit the personality of the character really well. I decided to draw out the two characters more to see if I could develop their concepts more, because I felt like one or two designs wouldn’t be enough. I like the edgy personality that he gives off and his overall colour aesthetic. However, I struggled to think of other ways to push myself further with his design, and I felt like he was too simple of an idea and I figured I wanted to push myself further and maybe go for a more humanoid design.

 

Demon Hotel Porter

I also worked more on the demon girl design and created a full body reference sheet for her. As I was working on her, I realised I actually preferred her design a lot more over the wolf, and I have decided that I think I would like to create her as my character model. The reason I like her more in specific is because I feel as if her shape language is far more intriguing and accurate to the brief. I think that I could accentuate her body quite well in a 3D format and perhaps make her hair bigger to further hone in her personality. I want to emulate a cheeky, mischievous personality type for her and I’d like to also mimic that with her design as well.

I took a lot of inspiration from Mavis for her. I liked how Mavis’ character is portrayed through her body shapes in the concept art for the movie, and I wanted to do the same for this character. I looked at the other women designs in Hotel Transylvania and I took note of how their hair is accentuated, and I figured after feedback from Rachel that I could do the same and make her hair bigger to push the cartoony style of her more, and I felt like that would translate well over to a 3D model.

Fullbody

This is the final design that I have settled on for her. I think that while it is simplistic it conveys her character very well and precisely. I wanted to emulate a hotel uniform design for her, and even some sort of secretary aesthetic as well. After speaking to Rachel, I got feedback with enable me to give her heels to match that secretary vibe as we thought it would be cute but also balance out the contrast of her colours well. I gave them a hoof sort of shape to take inspiration from Satyrs from mythology.