Posts tagged character design

Creature Design, The Wormbug Completed

I spent about an hour playing in Photoshop to finish the Wormbug’s linework and coloring.

The flatting stage went faster than normal as I already had the silhouette. I played around with a cool color palette for the creature. Instead of my normal flat shading with tones of black and white I chose to shade and with warm colors, something I’ve been working on since taking Kevin Cross’s color theory class. 

Bug-creature-design-v0 Bug-creature-design-v1 Bug-creature-design-v2 Bug-creature-design-v3 Bug-creature-design-v4
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Creature Design, Work in Progress

Bug creature design, work in progress. Started it as a rough-sketch iPad painting and I found the creature looked too blocky/brick-wallish to communicate clearly in silhouette (that stage isn’t depicted in the screencap). I refined the silhouette in Inkpad (image on the left) then started fleshing out details in the desktop version of SketchBook Pro (image on the right).

Bugman_-_wip

 

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Character Silhouettes

More practice with making character silhouettes! I’ve become rather taken with this outer-shape approach of designing readable characters by establishing a strong silhouette. I’ve doing this via Sketchbook Pro, pencil & paper, and the iPad app Inkpad.

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Instead of a long post, I captured my thoughts in this 10 min video via another iPad app: Explain Everything.

IMG_0130.mp4 Watch on Posterous

Silhouettes for character design are super useful, a technique I value now just as much as drawing the stick and bubble figure skeleton.

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Update December 7, 2011: fixed the link to the app Explain Everything.

Character Design Practice

Character_design_practice_1

This design is based on what I learned in Krishna Sadasivam’s Creating Crazy Characters class at Lean Into Art.

More practice to come, this time I tried to do all the steps in Sketchbook Pro which led to some improvisation on the silhouette step. The characters silhouette step is a way to establish a character pose and outline that “reads clearly” showing key aspects of the character’s inner and outer life in addition to their physicality. 

Krishna uses the lasso tool on this step in Photoshop to great effect. The Sketchbook Pro lasso doesn’t have the same feel or instant fill flexibility so in this attempt I blocked it all in by scribbling fills with the pen brush (pressure sensitive set to a brush width of about 10 pixels) to complete the character silhouette.

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