Tuesday 26 October 2010

Character Design - Week 6

So we are all at week 6 in our character design projects. This is what we were drawing today.

Clowns! Well not all of us. I've done a lot of long posts lately so this time I'm going to keep it short and sweet!


It is most clearly seen in this second set of drawings, that we were given a random type of character, and we had to draw that character in as many ways as possible. All lined up, like an identity parade!




One thing that I think many, including myself, had to be sure of, was that the characters heights varied. A common mistake is to make all the characters the same height.

The second part of the lesson was on the importance of silhouettes. We were shown a diagram with the silhouettes of many familiar cartoon characters. All of them could be identified just by their outline. So what we had to do was trace the silhouettes of our characters, to see if they could be improved.

These silhouettes were taken from my latest drawing of my characters. There were many improvements to be made. Particularly with the Medusa like character (the left most). There was originally no way to tell what it was until I'd gone over it with some extra lines in the hair. Basically the hair was done in such a way that from a silhouette, you couldn't see the head. There were other things disrupting the flow of the silhouette as well. The other two were much more readable, but were still kind of bland. Just making some of the outlines more defined, improved on them. Of course there's still more to refine!



I'll just end with something I did earlier. I had some help form one of the first years on the course. Unfortunately I don't actually know who it was, but I'm sure if he's following me, and reading this, then he will tell me! He was helping me to draw the construction of a basic human character. Something I've attempted on many occasions, and have failed to perfect. Half the problem is probably that I draw too many lines, but practice makes perfect... In theory.





Not all of them are human if your wondering what happened to the legs!

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