Character Design
Once I picked out of the four mythologies/stories which was ‘The White Snake’ that had the most popularity and familiarity for myself, I knew I wanted to go with one of the skillsets which was Character Design for it’s characters involved in the plot and a way to improve my drawing and techniques for this part of the project with further research involved. There is a total of 4 characters which include Bai Suzhen (the white snake protagonist), Xu Xian (the doctor and love interest), Xiao Qing (the green snake and sister) and the Buddhist Monk (the antagonist). I brainstormed many ideas with the characters and gathered many pictures from multiple movies, shows and operas together in Miroboard online to showcase as I thoroughly checked each character and design for research.
Once I got my first stage of the pipeline planned out for the character design process, I continued on with my research finding ways to build the characters with accurate descriptions and appearances with everything related to the story which included the setting of the story being the Tang Dynasty, around that specific era which included accurate accessorises, fashion and hairstyles for each character which would assist me in their creation.
I went back to the characters starting with Bai Suzhen the protagonist of White Snake with the references collected that I really enjoyed with beautiful hairstyles, dresses and pure colours that would match with the character’s signature. Once I got the inspirations I was motivated to get the colour palette for her with white being her base colour for purity and innocence and with the blue colours as her secondary colours for trust and goodness and gave the idea to the rest of characters to fit in contrast with the monk being the opposite of colours, her sister who is closest to the blues and most closest to her romantic lover who would share her colours.
I would then do the same with the 3 other characters with inspirational themes of clothes, appearances and accessories and most importantly their colour schemes. The sister Xiao Qing would take the green as her base colour for her youth and mischievous behaviour being the younger sister but also protective with secondary yellow for happiness, teal for loyalty and black to match with her style and opposite to the white. Xu Xian having the blues and and purples as his primary colour alongside black and white similar to Bai but purple as his divine loyalty and a mixture between blue and red to signify the morals and ethics of his own religion and plot to the story. Lastly the Monk having the warmest colours of red, orange and yellow in contrast to the other 3 characters as symbolised as a warning of anger, power, superficiality and to represent his own religion/faith in Buddhism. After jolting down their colours and personality I moved ahead with the concept art of the characters into my sketchbook.
Personally for me I’d prefer to sketch concept art into my sketchbook than using the digital tech for only later as it gave me freedom to sketch and practise with the characters I took down with different hairstyles and body shapes I preferred first glance. Following previous experiences from University I thought about the body shape, exclusive hairstyles, height differences and clothes to match with the character even being the first stage of the process I knew these wouldn’t be final but was a happy enough to continue onwards.
When I already picked out the hairstyles for the two sisters and the two men once they were sorted I experimented with clothing using the line-up sheets digitally on Krita and measured of the heights with shapes to keep the accuracy for each character to make 4 different pieces of clothing with the same characters hairstyles. I realised the Monk and Xu Xian with appearances as I hoped to figure them out from relooking at the references again to help me understand these fictional characters better.
It was a tough call but I managed to pick out the four clothes I realised were good enough and asked for opinions from my friends to what they thought worked best. Soon after I meshed some of the clothing and head appearances together and went with the final versions of the clothes that I needed to draw out again for the characters. But before anything else I needed to fill out facial expressions to showcase their personalities and emotions through non verbal communications and body language for how I view the characters and how they would act in different scenarios in different moments of their time. I took inspiration from other artists from films to assist me from artbooks to think over emotions I could convey in such as marvels spider verse movies to aid me for a better way to understand emotions better like lip syncing.
Then after finalising before completion with the selected pieces of clothing and adding secondary details to their designs to make them more realistic but keeping their cartoonish appearances I was able to go over each character’s line up using the lines to match the structure of their bodies from facials to the tips of their toes. I watched previous videos to help me through this process and improve my character turn arounds and sheets much better.
I soon got feedback about the character sheets and line ups with a few key points but overall a great design to my characters and my final in my portfolio.
