To begin with I went out into Leicester again and sketched the different people, I'm use to this now after doing so many for one of the previous assignments. I was on the look out for anyone who looked a bit different, and I know for certain Leicester has a few characters who like to roam about.
After spending a few hours drawing across a couple of different days I definitely found a good selection of people, the wet weather didn't help though, most people were in coats.
During one of the nights I also gathered reference from the internet of characters. To me an interesting character doesn't need an over the top outfit or suit of armor, instead they could be plain clothed. Look at Brad Pitt & Edward Norton in Fight Club, both have every day cloths on yet their characters are fantastic, or there's the main character from Memento, again a normal looking guy yet his various tattoos tell a completely different story.
The next thing I did was take a small selection of my quick sketches and reproduced them to a higher quality. Maybe this was a bad idea because this could have cornered my mind into thinking about these characters too safely which will be apparent soon, but I had fun doing these nonetheless.
Out of these sketches I then tried to shape them into an interesting character but I feel I didn't push them far enough. I thought about turning a homeless looking guy into an almost The Last of Us survivor [1] but looking back this was way to easy. I really should have played around more to see if anything more unique could have been done, obviously I did not want to throw tentacles on him but I could have pushed it a lot further.
I tried another character, this time a Big Issue seller and the idea of a Rorschach like person came to mind, hiding in plain sight with his costume in his bag but I quickly ditched this idea as I felt I was really bringing anything new to the design. Towards the end of the project I saw something in one of the sketches I done, the large coat collar around one of the women reminded me of some of the crazy neck ornaments some the African tribes wear and this sparked the design below of a Village Priestess or something, turning the handbag into a basket of shrunken heads. I only wish I had thought of this early.
In the interest of time I pushed forward with the Apocalypse survivor guy, thinking of various outfits. I again don't think I explored this enough, with my characters looking more like he's gained a new piece of equipment rather than a different design entirely. I tried to think of what it would be like to survive during an apocalypse, clothes would be torn or broken, things would be missing and as for weapons, they'd probably be rare, especially guns and ammo. I also should have used reference for base figure!
I dived straight into doing the orthographic without trying any colour variations and again I should have used reference for the figure.
The entire process of designing a character is a new thing for me and I without a doubt made a number of mistakes through out this project. The next character project that I've already done (I'm slow at posting this stuff!) has benefited from these mistakes and I'm much happier with the whole work flow and I think this has without a doubt improved the quality of my work. Next up though is the sculpture for this character!
My experience with sculpting is very limited so being asked to make an entire character was a bit scary. The only thing I knew was that I needed Sculpey and some modelling wire for the frame. I looked for videos on creating a frame because I have never actually created one.
As you can see my frame wasn't the best as it couldn't stand up by itself, this was a huge problem later on when it came to doing finer details. I now understand the importance of a good solid frame and won't be making the same mistake again!
Once I got to use how the Sculpey handled i really enjoyed modelling, if my model could stand up I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more. Adding nice details then to only flatten them out a few minutes later was a real pain. I am about to make another sculpture and again the mistakes I made with this character will help improve it, I will be making a good solid frame so I don't have to man-handle my model every 10 seconds.
This entire project was a huge learning process for me, learning about designing characters in the 2D space and 3D. I am pleased with the final outcome of both but I feel the design could have had more thought put into it but I think this is to do with my process more than anything. The best thing I have taken from this project are the mistakes that I made, because for the next character project I didn't make them again, leading to a much better end result, I'll post up the other character soon (hopefully)!
References & Notes
[1] http://media1.gameinformer.com/imagefeed/screenshots/TheLastofUs/TLOU_Gamescom_ConceptArt_1.jpg
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