Illustration: Characters

This week long project focused on the creation of characters, although, as typically with Illustration, in perhaps unconventional ways. My favourite way was drawing 3 random shapes in ink, then passing this to someone else and receiving someone else's 3 shapes. We had to select one of the shapes and using the shape as the main form, draw a character. This was passed to someone else again and repeated twice until afterwards we had to give the characters in front of us personality traits. Finally we exchanged sheets again to end up with already formed characters that we had to draw until we knew their design completely, imagining them in different scenarios as well. I loved this way of working as it was incredibly loose and reduced any pressure to immediately come up with an amazing design. When we were given 3 personality traits on Friday and asked to design a character matching them, I found this new way of working great for generating ideas and being a bit different with the designs.

Below are some of my sketchbook pages and character designs from the week.

I love the design of this character - there's so much personality in him just in this one position already (I'm quite annoyed that I didn't design him!)

Given the chance to modify him though I gave him hands to allow better action and lowered his tie below his collar

Nothing harder than trying to make a beaky nose look good in a front view! I took inspiration from Belleville Rendez-vous to help solve it though.

 The Final Colour Test

I wanted his outfit to be as dull as possible so that he could blend into the background, with almost sickly yellow-white skin to show that he often does.

Own Character Design

Personality Traits : Baking, Curvy, Dashing

Luckily it was 'Cake Friday' at college, so there was lots of observational material around. I loved looking at the folds and creases in the cupcake wrappers, which reminded me of old Elizabethan ruffles and the smooth curves of the icing were great to draw.

Initially I was happy with this as my final character design, but I started to find him too static and boring - there was nothing distinctive or unique about him, he looked like a design from Paperchase and he didn't leave any room for actions.

I returned to the ink shapes and this design as the more I looked at him the more his position suggested 'dashing' and his body looked gloppy, like cake mixture.

I really liked the ruffle idea though, so they stayed.

His sticky nature was really fun to play with, particularly on his run.

  
Colour Tests

Just a bit too dark, doesn't suggest cake mixture enough or light heartedness

 Final Choice

Just right! Light beige looks more like traditional cake batter

Overall I found it a great project and a fun week that resulted in some really nice designs and taught me a more natural and inventive way of designing characters that I'll definitely continue to use.