Week 1 – Gathering Inspiration and Character Concept:
We were tasked in class to create some designs for fairy-like creatures to fit in a forest habitat backdrop filled with mushrooms and fungi, so I quickly sketched out a few different designs to fit this theme. I decided to keep the colour palette quite limited and desaturated as the backgrounds lacked many vibrant colours. The three designs I ended up with seemed visually appealing in their own unique ways, but I soon realised moving into the project that I would have to take a less cartoonesque approach for my character in this project, instead making my creature concept more realistic than these previous designs.
Chosen Environment: Water Mills
The environment that I decided to choose for my project was the water mills, the reason being that the layout of the environment intruiged me. I really wanted to experiment with the contrast between the soft ambient light in the background, and the moody dreary lack thereof in the foreground. This inspired my to create a character that wielded a form of magic to emit a glow around the character in the darkness, drawing attention to the model’s design whilst also allowing it to fit into the fantastical environment.
Moodboard for my character design:
Moving into my concepts for my project, I had the idea to model my creature over an woodland animal so that I would be able to experiment with different fur textures on my model, and the character I ended up going with was a deer. I knew from the offset that I wanted to draw a lot of attention to the antlers of the deer’s character design, so I focused a lot on that whilst gathering references for my moodboard on pureref. I was inspired by many of these artworks to add moonlit decorations to the deer’s antlers, I also hope to add flowers too in my final model. When sketching out my character, I was drawn to the idea of adding large angelic wings to the deer to accentuate the fantasy aspects of the environment, however I dropped the idea as I realised that a winged creature wouldn’t be suited to a sheltered environment, and instead would be better suited in a large, open environment with easy access to the sky for them to fly. Therefore, I removed the wings and added more details to the fur on the deer’s back.
Overall, I believe my first concepts of this character are quite basic, but that will make it easier for me to develop upon it more easily. Although I’m saddened that I had to remove the wings, I am excited to place a lot off emphasis on the deer’s antlers in my final character designs.
Week 2 – Character Blocking Practice: Alien
Week 3 – Character Blocking: Deer
Week 4 – Further Character Sculpting
