We had Jon as our lecturer for this session, and we'll have him for all future character design sessions. We started out with some sheets of paper. Surrounding a blank circular area in the middle were some black rectangles, triangles and circles. And yet around THOSE shapes were some miscellaneous ink / paint splatters in various pastel colours.
We were first tasked with seeing how well we could remember how certain characters looked by drawing them from memory; these included Mickey Mouse, SpongeBob SquarePants, Snoopy, Moomin and Mario.
After the brief exercise, we were told to try and find shapes and characters with some of the ink blots. We could make them as large or as little as we liked, with any kind of details we wanted.
After about 10 minutes, we finished up with that and moved further into the middle, looking at the shapes.
Before we got to do anything with them, we had a look at shape theory. Shape theory is essentially what shape conveys to an audience, mostly about what a character is like. Typically there are three main shapes:
- CIRCLE - Cute, friendly, peaceful (e.g. Po from Kung-Fu Panda)
- SQUARE - Stable, solid (e.g. Superman from Justice League: The Animated Series)
- TRIANGLE - Dynamic, angular, somewhat evil (e.g. Jafar from Aladdin)
Combining shapes and highlighting specific ones make a character's personality and sometimes archetype stand out more, especially when reduced to just a silhouette.
Using the shapes, we were encouraged to make just those: character silhouettes. Not for characters that exist already, but for whole new ones. We did this for about 10 - 15 minutes, and I was trying to find characters that'd both feel like something I'd make, but also seem very unusual and weird. I found a couple of characters I really liked, including one with coils for limbs, a bird thing, a robot and an evil Shakespearean snowman.
We were asked to choose one character from our silhouettes, and draw how they'd look regularly in the blank circle in the middle. I opted for the bird thing, both out of necessity for a smaller character, and because it hits the sweet spot of being both weird and normal for me.
I nicknamed it "Fletchling", but that didn't matter at that point... because we were going to interpret everyone else's characters! By this, it meant putting everyone's characters onto the screen one by one, and then getting 2 minutes to draw them in our own way, using different markmaking tools each time. We ended up doing this for around 40 minutes, and it was really interesting seeing what everyone came up with!
At the end, we cut all the characters out and gave them to whoever drew the original. I managed to amass a collection of interesting looking Fletchlings, as seen here by a few of them!
And in the end, I had a sheet that looked like this!
This session was about learning the process of character design; the absolute basics. I thought it was a lot of fun, and didn't really have any issues with anything! I'm really looking forward to more character designing, especially since that's my favourite part of the animation process! Overall, a successful character design introduction!
No comments:
Post a Comment