Joe Sparrow / Illustrator - Animator - Designer / 07758224292 / joe@joe-sparrow.com

Wednesday 5 August 2009

character design stuff

Just posting some of the character stuff I've been working on, in order as much as I can, so hopefully you'll be able to see some semblance of a train of thought. Today's theme is vampires, devils and crows when I get round to drawing birds.



I got attracted to the square-ish body shape after I drew the guy at the bottom of the above page (he's a little to the right).




This project is actually for uni, and is hopefully going to be a joint venture with some of the more CGI-based classes over at the less-artistic-more-technical side of school. We design a character, then some of our designs will be modelled and rigged by them, then sent back over to us to hopefully animate next year. As such, I'm conscious that the style I'm working in right now is a little too stylised in terms of only working in 2d, so I really need to work on doing some turnarounds to make sure the character is going to look normal from every angle possible.



The idea of him having fangs and pointy ears / antlers / horns is pretty central right now, and I like the look of him smartly dressed with a 1940's-ish coat or jacket.


I either want his face to be pallid blue to contrast with a reddish body, or, if he ends up looking more diabolic, a reddish face with a light brown theme on his body.


This fella with the horns I picked pretty arbitrarily from the bunch above, just to see if I could develop him into a finished sort of character as practice. I think he looks okay, but he could certainly look better. Above you can see my attempts to give him some more exaggerated faces, because I know I have a tendency to criminally underexaggerate. Below was a neutral pose that I'm going to develop into a really basic turnaround.



I coloured him in photoshop using vectors. For some reason, (and I'm not the only person to complain about this) Photoshop PNGs always come out with a really dull colour. So, just imagine the colours in this one a little jucier.


Notice the claws sticking out of the sleeves are pretty much stolen from Captain K'nuckles, and I guess the colour scheme is pretty similar too. To be fair, I was planning on making him blue and red for a while before I started watching that show. I'm a little uncertain about the "hey arnold" head shape, too, but with a bit of stretchiness there's no reason why it shouldn't work.

Comments/criticism are appreciated!

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