Our first class on character design was on October 19th. I love character design so I was very excited for this class. The teacher talked about some basic information that I had already learned about before but something new I learned was that there is a line between someone that does character concepts, character designs, and character illustrations. As well as the idea of being able to combine the shape. Meaning, a character doesn’t always have to be just a circe, square, or triangle shape, but can be a combination of them.

Our first task was to draw a character on top of these random blobs. It was really fun and interesting to create random characters from our imagination. (I’m a of Kevin in particular) I struggled the most with middle blob, I stared at it for so long and wasn’t able to come up with anything that I really liked. In the end I just scribbled a thicc girl because we were out of time.

During the lesson, the teacher showed us some of her past work, which was very cool, and one of them was a character design for a mascot. She showed us all the variations she made and our task was to take one of the variations she had and expand on that design more. The direction I went for with mine was more elemental. Looking back, I would’ve kept the body size more similar to the original. They gradually got longer.

Above are some character concepts and a character illustration I did in the past. Both original characters of mine.

CHARACTER SHEETS

Character Design

The first step for this character building assignment was to answer 7 questions about our character that would help us understand them better. I also did some sketches along the side after answering the 7 questions.

My character’s name is Kuro–which means black in Japanese. He’s a creature from the spirit realm who is sent to bring chaos on earth but he’s gentle and lonely soul that just wants a friend. A human friend in particular, but on top of being extremely shy and anxious he has a taste for human blood. Which of course makes his quest for a human friend all the more difficult.

Character Design

Next we had to draw out some silhouettes of our character. Since I had already did some sketches (which wasnt meant to happen yet, oopsy) I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted Kuro to look, so I kept a similar feel with the silhouette drawings.

Character Design
Character Design
Character Design

After the silhouette drawings, we also had to come up with some different colour variations of out character along with a greyscale version. I really liked the black and white version of his design, but I went with the red colour palette because red gives him a more threatening aura, which would contrast his gentle personality even more.

Once that was done we were to make a character page with the character’s final design, their story, silhouette and colour variations and lastly a breakdown of their shape.

Character Design
Character Design
Character Design

Now that Kuro’s design was finalised, the next exercise was to create a turnaround accompanied by a sheet that broke down a specific aspect of the character. For example, hand, feet, or mouth, etc.

Above is the first turnaround, I didn’t like the way the side profile of his cape looked at all. Below is the updated version after the teacher showed me how to make it look better. Now I’m much happier with it, this version looks a lot better. For the second half of the exercise I decided to do both a hand and feet sheet even though we only had to do one. Kuro’s feet are very simple, like barbie’s feet. I wanted to do a hand sheet as well because it gave me a chance to figure out what his hands would look like since they are hidden under his cape most of the time. I decided to give him short and chubby fingers with sharp nails. I considered trying to give him more monster like hands with three claws and such, but I liked the idea of him always hiding the most human part of him, which would be his hands.

Character Design
Character Design

Lastly we worked on a pose and expression sheet. We only had about half an hour of class time to work on it, so these drawings are quite rushed and I plan on redoing them.

For Kuro’s expression, since he doesn’t have a face and just one eye, it’ll rely a lot of his body language and a lot of emphasis on his one eye to show his feelings. Which I was able to start showing in the expression sheet, however, I still want to exaggerate them more. And for his poses, he’ll either be cowering in anxiety or in a fighting pose. He’ll mainly be fighting with kicks and casting spells, rarely using his arms (when he does, it means he’s planing to go all out)

Character Design
Character Design

Here’s my upgraded pose and expression sheet. I’m much happier with these ones because I was able to spend more time on them. Surprisingly, I struggled way more on the expression sheets than I expected. Only having a circle for a face, no eyebrows, and big hood made it very hard to clearly show the feelings and drawing Kuro’s face in different angles was a whole other challenge. A lot of the angles looked so awkward when I first sketched it out. I’m pretty sure I used the eraser tool more than the pen tool while drawing these.