For this weeks class we went over the quirks of character design and how to make a successful design for a character using a lot of design principles and ideas to keep us on track, from things like silhouettes, to shape design, and using references for anything we are trying to do. We then moved onto a class exercise where we were given a range of silhouettes, and with a very limited amount of time, use our imaginations to try and use them to create characters. Below is my result from this classwork:
It was quite a simple warm-up task to get us in the mood for creating characters which was quite fun. I think I did a great job making use of these shapes to create silhouettes of characters. Next we moved onto another task immediately, here we had pictures of three people to use as reference that we needed to create unique designs of using different shapes as a basis. Below are my three character designs:
These designs also had to be made in a very limited amount of time, to be specific, 15 minutes. This explains the simplicity of each of these designs, however with the limited time I had, I think I did a decent job, however there are still a lot of things I would do differently given the chance, such as completely changing how the armor and the chainmail under-armor look on the furthest character to the right, as I believe they do not look suitable as pieces of armor and the visual quality detracts from the whole design.
After these two exercises we then moved on to learn more things that are key in the subject of character designing, such as proportions of the characters, “variations”(creating multiple concept designs for the same thing to find what lands), creating expression sheets to experiment on how the character’s face will emote, and creating turnaround sheets to show the animators how to illustrate the characters from various angles to make sure they know how their body works and to convincingly draw them in different angles.
Finally, with the outcome of this class, we were tasked with creating designs for a character that may appear in our group animated project. I volunteered myself to create the design for the character that will serve as the “Don” or the boss of the entire mafia organization we have conceptualized as part of the story of the animated narrative we are creating. There were many things I was thinking of when creating ideas of this character as I believe there are certain qualities that I should give this character, first off we have already established that the mafia is mainly comprised of sharks and as the boss of them, I believe this character should be an intimidating species of shark to reflect this position, so I settled with a great white shark. Below is the final concept of the mob boss shark I have designed:
I am extremely happy with what I have come up with as this design captures perfectly what I was envisioning this character to be, he is visibly large and intimidating thanks to his build/physique, he looks like an important figure thanks to his outfit and the decorative water lily flower and he has a unique silhouette that can be recognized when he lurks in the shadow. To make this design possible I took inspirations from many places, the main ones being King Shark (The Suicide Squad 2021) for his shape, especially in his head, Kingpin (Spider-Man) for some of the attire such a boss would wear to display regality along with his brute strength, and Captain Gantu (Lilo & Stitch) to help me find a middle area between these two aspects of the design of the character, I also looked at characters in similar roles as my character such as Vito Corleone (The Godfather) as other inspirations for this character, along with this I followed what the lesson advised and I looked at various reference images to help me further the quality of this concept art, such as images of great white sharks, baggy pants, tight suits for the folds etc. This character’s name is “Brutus” which reflects his design and personality perfectly and just sounds right for a man at the top of the mafia.