Practical Research – Character Design Analysis

In this blog I intend to look into the codes and skills to completing an effective sketch and final design. To do so I will look into tutorials online and articles that give tips for starting out. The two most important aspects of creating characters for me is to learn how to create faces and poses. Other features I will include clothes as this seems to be my weakest area.

POSES

This video explained to me the aspects of drawing out poses and adding to the initial ‘line’. The idea is to practise with other pictures of motion, like a family jumping with joy. And learning the motion line that allows myself to add parts of the character on it. This line is a basic trace of the characters shape. After I have this line I will be able to add pieces of the character such as torso and head. These pieces will be simple sketched shapes with no detail, just a foundation of what to start with. The video maker narrates the above video and explains to create quick rough pieces as these are not final pieces and only serve as the foundation to add to this to create a better piece.

When continuing this pose research I went to searching up more about the actual style I intended to go down. This style that I intend to emulate is that of a manga art / cartoon art. The reason for this is that realism in this world would not suit my way of thinking and cartoons would allow for more creative characters. This would also allow me to later on create vast future worlds without the limitations of modernism. With my previous work, I will be able to use this shape set to add to that. One important part of this style is the proportion of bodily features within the character, however I myself will not be taking these ridiculous choices as to keep a level of real life into the aspect.

 

FACES

When first looking at faces, I wanted to see the codes behind setting it up and executing the full image. By looking into more realistic art before my aimed cartoon style, it will allow me to see the basic foundation and build from this when learning new techniques. In this video I am shown the structure when planning a face art, the basic oval then added to by four lines to help place the facial features and to make sure that the face is not lopsided or whatnot. I am shown the different styles of females and males in the bone sharpness to the shadow and detail to the character. The different parts such as the bush of the males eyebrows to the thinness of the female, the sharp chin build to the soft jaw and finally the large broad nose to the small button like. While these are not set between the sexes, it allows me to keep an open mind to biology of the art which would otherwise be unchecked.

Now moving onto the cartoon style side of creating faces, I was able to acquire more skills and chances to practise than I had intended. Firstly, I was shown the codes and ways to form age on someone’s face. It also showed me another way to set these pieces up, by using the line system but adding things such as jaws and then onto other features build faces easier. Other features showing emotion was shown to me with the simple use of eyebrows while also showing how to set these up in a way that stays true to the original style. Much similar to the pose style of a cartoon style, it has some outworldly concepts with the huge eyes and what not. This will be countered as I will be keeping the real tone but within a cartoonish style, much like a Shonen Artists take.

CLOTHING

When it came to clothing, I needed a simple fast video on the simple mistakes to avoid to further push my improvement on the subject. I was able to do this by watching this video and taking in the information given. Being shown the mistake of over using folds and wrinkles was something I honed to. I had this issue and having this video to show me the way to flatten these issues out allows me to create a mood board of practise takes that I will complete later on down the line of my blog creation.

Having this blog has allowed me to fully see the world in which I will be creating and therefore allowed me to see the codes which I can follow to successfully complete my own work in a high fashion. With this I am able to move on to some practise later on down the line of my blogs while also allowing me to research into some already established character to see what would be the best to emulate and learn from.

 

Reference

Williams, N. (2018). Art Clothing Mistakes (wrinkles and folds). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROgeOas4I0o [Accessed 1 Mar. 2020].

RapidFireArt (2017). How to Draw Faces. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMEBSQJYaAY [Accessed 1 Mar. 2020].