Character Concept
Overview
In this lesson, at first, we looked at some examples of the concept, character design, and character illustration and knew the differences between them. Then we started to learn the process of creating characters.
The first thing we need to decide is what kind of character we want to create and what his/her/its environment is. So here are seven questions to answer:
Exercise 1
Then we started to draw our own characters.
This is the character I drew. But It seemed like I misunderstood the content of the exercise a little bit, focusing too much on the drawing of the character when we should be focusing on the story behind the character and answering the 7 questions.
Exercise 2
In the next week, we drew some silhouettes first which is based on our backstory. During this exercise, it is important to note that we are not painting different characters, but transforming the same character — exaggerating or changing some of the details.
These are the silhouettes that I drew.
Since it was only an hour, and I struggled for a while to figure out how to draw it in the beginning, I only drew a few silhouettes. I really appreciate Bianca still giving me some advice on the silhouettes that I drew.
Exercise 3
Then we learned about the character’s color using — Monochromatic, Analogous, Complementary, and Triad, as well as the character traits implied by different colors.
After that, we finished 3 different color variations of our character and made the full model sheet which included story, silhouettes, shape breakdown, greyscale, and colors. The sheet is very important because it is a general reference for the other sheets that our character will need later.
This is my model sheet.
Reflection
These two character animation lessons showed us and led us to make a complete model sheet, and let us get familiar with part of the animation process. In this class, I understand that a good role needs to be polished constantly and new possibilities should be tried constantly.
But I think the second lesson was a little too fast. When I was doing exercises, most of the time I could not think well about how to draw better because of the limited time, so I could only quickly finish the exercises in a task-like way.