Character Design- First workshop

In our first Character Design workshop with Justin we learnt about the basics of designing a character.

In order to imagine a character you have to be able to answer these questions:

• Who are they?
• What are they? i.e. their function
• When? i.e. setting and time
• Where? i.e. location
• Why? i.e. motivation, emotions
• How? i.e. achieving goals, special ablities

Some key character archetypes:

• Hero
• Villian
• Mentor
• Ally
• Love interests
• Trickster

The shapes used to create a character tell you a lot about them:

• Circles- soft, rounded, friendly, child-like, cute, harmless
• Squares- Strength, solid, powerful
• Triangles- Sharp, dangerous
• Mixed shapes e.g. Batman- squares & triangles= strong but slightly dangerous

We took a well known character and had to change its shapes to alter your perception of the character:

My character: Obelix 

After some further guidance I produced these images:
Squares:

Triangles: 

Characters also have different styles:

• Iconic- simple shapes e.g. Mickey Mouse
• Simple- Stylised e.g. retro cartoons
• Broad- Anatomy, more sophisticated, more detail
• Comedy Relief- subtle, complex, exaggerated
• Lead Character- stylised, more human, very sophisticated, very complex
• Realistic- used in games, extremely human like

We then had to take another well known character a either make it more iconic or more realistic:

I chose Eeyore and started to make him more realistic by making him look like a real donkey (top drawing) but I was advised that because Eeyore is a toy you would have to make him more realistic by drawing a realistic looking toy (shown to me in the example drawing at the bottom of the page)