This week Alec and Sarah have presented us about the characters which is always have been my favourite subject because I love characters and how people make them come to life by designing them. Alec told us about fundamentals and told us to not worry about little details. He taught us to focus on body proportions, head proportions and just simple forms of the body. I found this very useful because we were learning to do this even for life drawing that we have started last week.
We learned that there is a lot of different ways to see and sketch different forms and shapes when it comes to characters. We also learned that one method of drawing characters is never going to be superior to another because there is a lot of good ways of creating out there. You just have to find the method that you really like and then just explore. When you are considering different designs through volume and form we are told to usually forget about flat designs because they don’t help out too much.
We then were told to look at different books and shapes that would helps us draw fundamentals of the a character. These are some of the characters that I came up with really fast.
We also learned about the character design process and why is it important for it to happen. The start of the process is writing a simple description to give your character personality, then gather some of the resources and inspiration. having some loose sketches and silhouettes to convey different ideas, redrawing the character differently and then finalising the details.
We then had Sarah talk about her side and how she understand character design which was really fun because we got too see character design understanding from her side which I really enjoyed. She talked about how a character influences a story and how it can bring emotion to it as well depending on what you create and how you create it. She also talked to us about different steps that we could take to make character better and more realistic. We also looked at different character designs from different artists.
Me and my crystal world group then discussed about our main character and what should her importance be. We moved to one table, there was 3 of us in the group at the time and we took the white board and wrote down different ideas for the character and their description. We were struggling a little bit at the start so Alec came up and we asked for some assistance and he told us to give her a background first and then you can give her a description depending on where is she from and why is she there in the first place.
As you can see we came up with a description for our main character crystal and what she might look like later on. We called her Krystal and we wanted her to be pretty generous, but also serious. She would obviously be a Queen that would rule something. Thats what we described her as for the time being anyways. We also described her with a side kick, which would probably be a squirrel that would be on her shoulder most of the time. The side kick would be able to transform into anything they want. We also discussed the wanted her to be like Lara Croft at the very beginning at least. Unless something changes later.
We then met up after class and talked about what we might want the character to look like. The main point for the character would be is that she is an ice queen and she would have some sort of side kick that would help her in battle when she needed the help. We all sat down and agreed to just come up with one or two designs for the character and share them with the rest of the group the next time we see each other. This was because we were not a big group so we did not go for a lot of designs to choose from because we didn’t want to over load our selves. These are some of the designs that I came up with while thinking about different characters of the world that we are building. Then we also talked about different creatures and what the world might have.
These are the some of the characters that I came up with that might be useful later on because we might learn how to animate characters and its always a possibility. I will probably end up sharing all of my crystal world designs later on because some people might join our group and I might want to share my designs and the thoughts with the rest of the team because I would probably want them to see my vision and my understanding of the world before they start doing anything. This is because people tend to change groups work without even noticing themselves.
In class I have also decided to just draw up a simple character from a reference because I saw that there was a bunch of markers laying around.
Mantas Macidulskas 