artist toolkit 2d: character design study

 
The Team: a Character Design Study

This week, we discussed what makes a good character design, and the different features a characters design can have to make it effective. Different features of a characters design can help viewers to infer things about said character. 

 for example, when creating a character artists should focus on things such as: the setting of the story/time the story is set, shape and colour theory, composition and balance and many more features. Each of these different design features are so important when making a character. an example of this is as follows: a kind and soft character who has the power to control ice. You would not imagine this character in dark red and orange tones and sharp shapes. instead, you would accosiate them with softer shapes like a circle, and colours such as white and blue, as these colours imply they could have something to do with ice/snow. This is just one example, but it shows how important these type of features can be when designing a character.

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In class, we were given the task of creating a character each in a small group. In this group, we all chose a character 'archetype' of different types of characters that play roles within a team. The characters were: The leader, The Brains, The Brawn and The wild card. I decided to create the brawn character for our group, and below is the design i came up with as well as some information about her and my groups ideas too.

My group came up with the idea to create a team of vampires, (except for our wildcard, who was a human!) who were disguised in a human society as a normal company, but were secretly a blood bank stealing the blood of their clients. Since i had to design the brawn type character, i first went through and generated some ideas. 

My original idea was to do a different take of the brawn type character, and instead of doing something big muscley and physically strong, i wanted to create a slick, silent and slippery type fighter, taking inspiration from assassins.  I wanted her to be disguised as a manager with a very serious deminer,  but she acted and moved fast in an elegant type of way. When i first fought of a brawn, i imagined a strong man - but i wanted to create something a little different and elegant yet still strong and scary.

I drew my design up originally in a more realistic style, and then also redrew her in my more cartoon like style. I did this because i wanted to experiment with shade language, with i think can be more apparent in my cartoon like style. As shown in my first drawing, a lot of her features are very sharp and stern - such as the lines on her skirt and jacket, the heels and points on her shoes and ears and even her facial features. I really wanted to enthesis this in my other style and i think its really apparent. I even added sharp nails and line art to most of her features, giving her a very serious and mean looking appearance, which is what i was going for. 

Here are both of my designs side by side. I really enjoyed creating this character and id honestly love to experiment more with different design variants of her. i really liked my groups idea and i really enjoyed this quick warm up character designing task!