Week 17

I managed to finish the second character concept this week, it was a little easier as I'm not modelling this one so I was able to get really creative with him. My previous character couldn't walk too well so he would be riding on this characters back as a mount, so I researched different mounts and how they behave and came up with these silhouettes. you can see I came up with a lot more variation then with my other character, with, what I feel, each sil having feel different with each carrying their own character. My two favourites were either 3 or 6. Starting with 6 I liked the idea of the fall from glory, originally this character was renowned figure in the worlds capital universities and originated from a rich family, but after getting commissioned to the fishermen as a navigator against his will he catches sin and becomes this feral beast. Also you've got the loyal companion almost dog like, whereas 3 takes a slightly different angle which in the end gripped me more. Although he was transformed into this hideous beast I feel that I was able to keep he regal stature and look, I also emphasised the tragedy with his pose of him slumped down facing the ground, but tried to disguise with incorporating the seat on his back weighing him down. I also added him with bound hands with rope to stop him from hurting anyone when the disease develops, I feel this shows his good nature purely through his design.

the first set of iterations were a bit of failure, basically I couldn't generate any ideas that I felt needed to be incorporated into the initial design, which I can't tell is either proof my design is strong or that I'm not thinking enough, but from this sheet I only incorporated the hanging lamp.

I started to notice that wooden mount on top of his back seemed a little cartoonish and stylised

which I didn't feel fit in with the overall feel of my characters so I tried to work out ways in which to alter it to not only change the design but to make it a little more readable, because not even me at this point understood truly what it was, I was guessing that it was a wooden structure of some sort but it didn't feel right. There was some problem solving where if I was going to have this wooden structure the captains hat collides with it so I changed it to a top hat to keep his nobility whilst not merging into the wooden design.

moving over to the value studies you can see I'm repeatedly altering the wooden structure to seem less stumpy and comical as a last attempt to try and make it work. not too much to say about these, I just tried to match a value set to my previous character, trying to keep them simple, streamlined and effective.

I fell into the same trap as my character before with the colour studies. I was getting frustrated and trying to come up with colour purely for the sake of colour, I wanted him to be colourful to contrast against my other character, but in doing this I feel that they would contrast in a negative way, you can see with my difference passes that I was just trying to pull colour ideas wherever I could, and after going back to research nobility in the 19th century, they didn't actually wear that bright clothes it was mainly blacks and greys so I decided to stick closer to my value studies.

with my final design you can quite clearly see that my silhouette has completely changed, I felt through the iterative process my character has lost the tragic and prideful effect and has become almost like a Disney concept, so first of all I ditched the wooden box thing with something more readable and fitting to his story, now he has a ships crow's nest attached to his back which also provided the ability to add these haunting draping ropes that wrap around his form. I've kept a plain and value based colour scheme except connecting the two characters together with the blue element, I gave him a more saturated blue around his hat to make up for the lack of it compared to my other character, and gave him a de-saturated blue on his socks to separate the dullness just a little bit.

In conclusion I'm ridiculously impressed with what I've provided not only on a design standpoint but also with my digital painting, this is the area I most struggled with, with this course and now I think I'm starting to get the hang of things.

I've also created my character basic skeleton using z spheres, which went surprisingly better than I expected, not much to report on this, I'll have more to say when I really get into the sculpting.