week 15

This week we start our new project, which is to design two characters who are opposites yet complement each other, e.g. hot/cold, fat/skinny, good/evil. I'm freaking out a little about this project as I'm not familiar with the character creation process, and all around I'm not great with visualising and depicting organic objects, let alone the human form. luckily life drawing this year has been ridiculously helpful in helping me understand the human anatomy and proportions in which come with it. I've also ordered "Figure drawing for All its worth" as I know I will need all the help in order to ensure that this year's character project goes better than last.

I've tried not to get overwhelmed by this project so I'm trying to take it nice and slow for starters and build momentum as I get more confident, rather than rushing too fast and crashing and burning, so this week I've been working on the initial planning: the character matrix, mood boards and silhouettes.

When the character matrix was first introduced I thought that it was a bit of a waste of time but by building up a story and motive for my character this really helped me conquer an issue I mainly suffer from during the early concepting process, and that's idea generation. It's what I most dread with my projects; the first initial nothingness and trying to work from there, but by using the matrix my characters were basically already visualised in my head.

I decided to create a basic npc character as I'm not all that confident with this process yet which gives me a purpose to keep my character a bit underwhelming as not to distract from primary characters, and I'm quite happy with what I've come up with. Basically my character is part of a faction called the "fishermen" which are tasked with going out to sea and fighting giant fish monsters. Originally my character was plainly just a fishermen and his opposite was a rich naval navigator, but I felt that was too boring so I returned back to the character matrix, and developed the world around him a little more, which was the world surrounded by fog called sin, which mutated people to fish monsters so I Created the fishermen (I'll leave the matrix below so you can understand the story a little more).

Originally I was going to go for a dark fantasy medieval period, but as I was in early development I just so happened to be looking through the art of bio shock 2 "deco Devolution" and I noticed all the ranges of fabric materials and properties and as my character was going to be by design bland in order to allow the main character to pop, fabric materials is pretty much all I had to experiment with, and I felt a more modern approach was more appropriate for this factor, so I settled with the 19th century.

Just by glancing at my mood board it's easy to tell that I'm heavily inspired by "from software's Bloodborne", so much so that I'm worried that my idea is too alike, but I've settled now and I need to keep moving forward as to not fall behind. as "Bloodborne" is involved obviously so is Lovecraft, as I'm really trying to push that man vs. sea life, trying to capture that unknown about the sea and push it into my characters world, which will apply heavily to my second character who will be this monstrous fish man. Although my character is a soldier type I want to maintain the original design of a fisherman so I'm going try and pull together a navy/fisherman/simplistic design so I started with a mass image dump of the general feel I want from my characters design and world, which helped me visualise a bases for my character. I then gathered ideas about accessories, but I'm not sure how useful this will be as I want my characters to be stripped down but maintain a strong silhouette. Fabrics was interesting I liked how every piece seemed to carry their own patterned decals, and the range of materials I have to work for on my characters. Finally I had weapons, as my character is a soldier type he needs a weapon to fight, I wanted him to seem almost powerless against the monsters, so I was thinking single shot muskets, as they would barely affect anything but still gives him the intimidating and unbroken will factor I was going for.

As I always spend far too much time on the initial planning of my projects I kept my silhouettes down to a minimum, and as I fell in love with number two right away and my mind didn't change by number eight I decided to stop; I did like number three but something about the waders cap combo made him seem far too childlike.

After picking my sil I just copy and pasted him a bunch and then went through them making minor adjustments and trying to see what elements I liked most and pick and chose which ones I would keep. I liked how my character was developing I truly felt like each of these sils felt like a different person part of the fisherman, but after asking peers on which they found most visually interesting it came down to number 3, 6 or 8 and as 6 felt more like a pirate and number 8 face was completely covered I decided to further iterate 3.

in my second set of iterations I fell in love with number 6, but I wasn't sure how I would be able to effectively model the waders as I would need to create an inside, and wasn't familiar enough with what can be created within zbrush, then I noticed without realising I incorporated myself in number 3, it's how I wear my trousers and the thick baggy jumper to suit, which made me become kind of attached, so I decided on 3.

It's finally happed we've started facial studies in life drawing, and it was tough, I haven't really tried to tackle this area before and but as always I've taken points from the class and feel a lot more confident on tackling the are in the future.