Character Design

Personally, character designing I my most favourite part of animating. This time it seemed a little awkward because I was going to work with stop motion, clay animation, which would be my main character. Therefore I couldn't draw really exciting characters because I'm not very experience with animating with clay and I would have to design something simple and easy to do. This left me without much choice of a large range of different characters to design because I'd have to make it in the end and edit it and animate it.

The easiest idea seemed to work with simple shapes like circles and squares.

Designing her 2D version was much more enjoyable because this is something I know how to do and can animate. I found that using colour pencils as the base to be a very convenient method. It makes for a simple and effective base for facial and body structure while also making the page appear more appealing. It also doesn't get in the way of easily making out the characters features that have been drawn in pencil over it but rather enhances them and makes them look more three diminutional and realistic.

For all my designs, I chose a hairstyle from what I thought would be most convenient and stuck with it throughout the designing, it made it easier to see what and who each character was, that along with the colour pencil I used for the base of the character.

I can easily say that I had the most fun when designing the other characters that could appear in the film. Simply because I went al out with different design styles for characters and simply had a lot of fun in the process. I also applied a lot of my live drawing practice into the body structures, making them appear more accurate and realistic enough. I challenged myself by stepping out of my comfort zone of my already established art style and tried to experiment with new styles that I could come up with. This helped me broaden my knowledge on character designing and made me see it on a more wide aspect.
Considering character designing is my favourite part of animating, I wouldn't usually spend a lot of time on it because I would simply use an already established art style, simple because I'm comfortable with it.
During this course, I've had one specific recurring style of character deigning in my doodles with I seem to really like doing and I do quite like the look of them. In all the drawings above, I have characters with long, displeased faces; looking back through my earlier sketchbooks I see that I've used this style quite often. It's a rather appealing style and shows enough body language and facial expression to understand what the character's personality would be like. If not now, I would like to try out and work with this style int he future.