The most anticipated week by far, there wasn’t anything in this class that I hadn’t already seen mentioned in art books, online tutorials or behind the scenes documentaries. Still – it was really exciting getting to learn about it properly and getting to really apply my skills. As a nice warm-up for learning shape language we had to draw characters from a bunch of pre-drawn blobs. This was super fun to wake my brain up – I even made a quick animation of my favourite face later.

We then drew caricatures of some celebrities – I purposely avoided Marilyn Monroe as I knew she’d be too easy for me to stylise. This was a great exercise in exaggerated proportion and shape language in order to convey a certain personality or archetype.

In our Halloween class we were tasked with drawing our classmates and then exaggerating their proportions – I feel it fits best to put them here. I first drew them more realistically to get a grasp of their general features, then exaggerated and stylised them as cartoonishly as I could manage before making something defaming.

When it came to designing characters for our world, I knew I wanted to get as freaky as possible with the designs for the mutants. Below are sketches I did in preparation for the class trying to figure out the heights of the band members and what mutations I could give them. Unfortunately I wasn’t using references here, so some of these designs are a little uninspired in my opinion. I was quite happy with the design for the drummer being a hulking fish guy with a fin mohawk.

During class I sketched some silhouettes to see what shapes looked good. A teammate then came up with the idea of ‘Johnny Ska’, a ska punk lover who dresses horribly, never brushes his teeth and has a million teeth. I based his design elements off characters featured on Operation Ivy posters (a ska punk band) as well as the mascot of a skate punk band named All. I developed him a little, coming up with different outfits and proportions for him before pivoting to designing the villain of our world – the CEO of a conglomerate of energy companies exploiting the world’s one remaining energy source – uranium.

 

Everybody loves a good villain, that’s why it was very important that I put great thought into our CEO villain. The original idea for her two faces came from the two-faced thing from ‘The Thing’, which I then changed into 1 1/2 faces – similar to Tomie by Junji Ito. This reflects her personality as a two-faced liar.

I then pushed the exaggeration, making her face more grotesque with botched plastic surgery as well as giving her an extreme hourglass figure. I really wanted to emphasise her cruel, cutthroat personality so I tried using as many harsh angles and corners as I could – especially in her shoulder pads. I also gave her extremely long nails to give her this violent, monstrous look. I first chose a very stereotypical business outfit for her, but after some Pinterest scrolling I found some nice outfit variants to try. Unfortunately I didn’t get to finalising her design, though I had lots of fun experimenting and working through possible designs!