Wednesday 24 October 2012

Unit 8: Character - Week 1-3 - Sketches

Hey Everyone,

Week 1 with Justin had us also knock up some quick drawings based entirely on random sketching at what was a quick rate for me. I found it rather challenging, not being an overly fast drawer myself besides being told to do something and produce results in that second certainly isn't an easy thing... well not for me.
I only had 2 but the first pretty much dumbfounded me until someone gave me a pointer on it (Week 1 class sketches are below). I had a baby traffic warden and then an un-dead Goth, the second I didn't get into much because the traffic warden took so long to isolate... besides I was already thinking of my design choices for the robot theme for my character design particularly as well as actively thinking about pirates... some of which are on the pages where my drawings are located. Not that I have any experience drawing pirates or robots lol.


Week 2 sadly I was absent - personal issues but I wont bore with those. I was rather gutted that I didn't attend though, its quite cool seeing how all of this works and how professionals work in this industry... I had no idea but now I know...somewhat.

Week 3 which just passed was very insightful, firstly the loss of what Justin referred to as "Sausage Limbs" using wavy lines to connect joints I have been doing that for ages so its nice to get out of it if its a nasty habit. What the lesson broke down to was finding the basic shapes in popular characters (I got superman) we were therefore asked to play with the proportions of our chosen character to create a different type of character (See my Superman Alternates below).


I found it very interesting thinking of characters this way as he said its before detail so all you are doing is fine tweaking your foundation to make something truly unique. You are essentially making your character less generic and more stylised... A feat we should all be aiming for if we wish to make our own particular make with a particular style of character.

I kept the skull shape which Justin knocked up basically narrowing down Superman's skull to a cube in perspective. Just like that using a simple primitive you know how a character is constructed... This is key before doing the detail to any character... knowing the basic building blocks of a character.


Last but not least Justin gave us a character to do further tests on, something I was kind of slow on having never really researched pirates. Mine ended up coming out a bit cow boyish until Justin provided me some drawn props (Thanks Justin). Anyway what was kind of Ironic getting a pirate was that that's actually one of my character styles (Robot Pirates)... All it showed me was I'm not ready but now I know it so now I'm going to fix it!

I will dedicate an evening to it over the weekend and hopefully knock out a few alternate ideas and get some proportion decisions made with a couple of little character head alts and some costume exploration. That's the goal here really... I might even begin tomorrow evening just to get a head start.

Well that concludes this little post on Weeks 1-3 of our lessons of character design with Justin, I will rectify my prioritisation issues (namely share myself between Narrative & Character evenly). They are both important and Characters are something I really wish to get good at... for my own personal shellfish reasons :P

Take care all!

xXStItChXx

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