In this exercise, I have been tasked with choosing three characters of my choice and outlining their shape and pose. The three characters I have chosen are in the following order:
- ‘Faith’ – From the game Mirror’s Edge.
- ‘Medic’ – From the game Team Fortress 2.
- ‘Plague Marine’ – From the franchise of War hammer 40,000.
Let’s take a look at the first character and go from there.
- Faith:
I chose to create an outline of Faith first as she has the most realistic human elements on my character list. She wears clothes that do not effect her natural outline. What this means is that she does not wear anything like heavy armour or spiked shoulder pads or a helmet. If she did wear these things then they would effect her outline by making her look bigger or brawnier. However she does not wear these items and thus she has a very realistic human shape. I find natural human shapes and forms hard to draw as you have to pay attention to details such as how the upper leg is slightly wider than the lower leg, or how upper torso (Shoulder blades and rib cage area.) can be wider than the lower torso (Stomach and pelvis area.) or vise versa depending on the characters shape. I found this character the hardest to draw an outline for out of the three I have picked.
2. Medic:
I chose to do Medic second as he, along with all the other Team Fortress Characters, have incredibly distinct and unique outlines. These character’s were made to be as user friendly as possible by making each playable classes outline so unique that a player know’s who they are based only on the characters build. The image below show’s the rest of Team Fortress’ classes and their outlines to show you what I mean:
These characters are also fairly easy to make an outline for, as they are bulky and cartoon-like, but realistic enough that the still retain a realistic human structure/skeleton. The best word to describe how these characters are designed would be simplistic. There is also another part of Team Fortress 2 that effect’s how players see the characters outlines and that is cosmetics. Certain cosmetics can only be worn at certain times of the year as they change the characters outline far too much and can confuse players. A picture of a character in their default cosmetics can be found below and a picture of that same character but with Halloween cosmetics can be found below the previous picture. These two examples will show you what I mean when certain cosmetics drastically change the characters outline:
Default Scout:
Halloween Scout:
Medic was the second hardest to outline even though his design is simplistic, it still has a lot of emphasis and exaggeration on the limbs to make it look cartoon-like but just realistic enough to make the character immersive.
And now onto the last character I chose:
3. Plague Marine:
I found that the Plague Marine was the easiest character to create an outline for. This is because the armour this character is wearing is adding so much bulk and brawn to the characters outline which in my opinion makes it far easier as you have more straight lines than curved ones and are less likely to make a mistake when trying to add in those refining details on say the leg muscles or shoulder joints. With lot’s of added mass and bulk, you use less lines as the armour covers up a lot of the more detailed and refined parts of the body. This can go for any shape and form, not just the human one. Adding more mass to a character in the form of clothing or over armour makes it easier as you have less natural or realistic detail to worry about and can even add your own elements.