RECAP Character Design Project

As I have recently been M.I.A on my blog for the last couple of months, I have decide to write a recap of my recent character design project, explaining what I did during, what I learnt, my decisions within it, and my opinion of my final design and the overall project.

I feel I had a really good start to this project, I had a solid concept for my character, a supermodel ghost who wanted revenge against the ones who had a hand in her murder, and I was churning out multiple designs in which my model could look. I was then introduced to the program Illustrator, which I would create the line work for my character. As I had never used this program before and because I did not have this software at home, I could only use it during college hours, this meant that I could only practice with and use the tools for a certain amount of time each day. Due to these reasons, in the beginning of the project, it would take me a day at the least just to get one character fully outlined. As I got more confident with the tools, I felt it became easier and faster to create my characters turnarounds.

Throughout this project, I experienced a lot of troubles with my character’s proportions. Although there are still some issues within my characters faces, I feel I have gained more confidence when it comes to drawing people. This was due to the fact I was constantly drawing with references, whether they were taken from the internet or were photos in which my friends have posed for me, it gave me a better understanding of a human’s body proportions and scale, creating a better base in which I could form my character.

Once I had my solid outlines complete, I took my characters into photoshop and positioned and resized them to fit within my character design sheet. As the outlines were created in illustrator, a vector based program, when the line work was resized, it did not lose any quality and the lines were still smooth and clean. As I had wanted a watercolour effect, to make my character look more ghostly, I decided to research online for more watercolour styled brushes in which could give me my desired effect. I eventually found a set in which I liked, downloaded them and in the end, I do think that my ghostly effect was fully achieved, and it was not a waste of time trying to find the specific brushes online.

For my background, as I wanted my character to appear high class and elegant, I decided that I wanted to use a marble surface pattern. Wanting this, I searched and found a tutorial showing how to create a marble effect using photoshop. This is a technique I feel I can reuse in future projects, as I could take what I have learnt from this tutorial and try using it to create other backgrounds of a similar pattern, for example, this pattern could be similar to a stormy sky, as the veins of the marble could be transformed into flashes of lightning.

When looking at my final design now, I’m quite proud of what I have achieved after being introduced to a lot of new things during this project, such as drawing characters and using illustrator. I believe my piece looks professional as it is clean, the colours within it work well with each other, and if I were to give it to a client, I feel it is very understandable so they could easily grasp my concept and enjoy my character for what it is.

Although I do love the design, now looking at it, a couple of weeks after I handed it in, I have realised there are some flaws. The font in which I have used for the character’s backstory, I feel is readable when up close, yet when looking from a distance it just looks like tight squiggles, this could have been fixed by using a more readable font and a different size. Another error was within the faces and head sizes of the character’s dynamic poses, this is something I know I struggled with a lot during this project, so it could be possible that people may not notice at first glance, however I know there’s a problem so it draws my eyes to it immediately. The last and the most devastating mistake to me was the misspelling of the word scorned, which I spelt ‘scourned’ in the main title of my whole design. It makes me so disappointed in myself that I did not spellcheck everything before I printed the final design. I was so proud of this final piece and I was ready to share it on social media, until one of my friends pointed out my mistake, this made me not want to post it at all, as I felt if my friend could notice this misspelling, then many others on social media would notice it too.

From my weaknesses during this project, in future ones I will know now to practice drawing faces more often, learning how to draw facial features at different angles, helping me gain more confidence within character design. I will start leaving myself enough time to play around with different fonts and sizes, keeping my information within theme, yet still readable from afar. And last of all, I will ask both my tutor and my group of friends to give me feedback on my work, before I make any final prints, so that they can suggest areas in which I could improve or hopefully they could even point out misspellings that I may have not noticed, or brushed by when designing my work.  

Overall, I did enjoy this project as I learnt things which I could take into further projects. Before this project, I thought illustrator would be very hard and complicated to use, I hated the thought of going anywhere near it in my projects. But now that I’ve used the program and became more confident with a few aspects of the software, I feel it is a lot more cleaner way of working, especially if you have a more graphic based style. I will be using this program in more projects, current and future.