Week 1 - Week 4 Illustration and Visual Narrative : Character Design from Vormator Elements

29/08/2017 Week 1-Week 4
Wynne Pankusya [0333258]
Illustration and Visual Narrative
Exercises

Lecture 

While tracing the shapes, Mr.Hafiz also gave us a lesson about how we should design a character. Character design might look simple, but that simplicity was created after a lot of developments. This is the reason why designing a character is a hard work. It is crucial to know how a character works or fails thus we can figuring out the things that we need to do to build a character.

Img.2 My research "Little Miss Sunshine"
source: http://mrmen.wikia.com/wiki/Little_Miss_Sunshine

This character came from one of series of childrens' books which is "Little Miss" by Roger Hargreaves. This female character have it certains characteristic that make her pop out and not just the look but also the personality. The round shape and also yellow colour on her resemble the sun just like her name. Accentuating the brightness of her assisted with a big smile on her face. From the story of her, it's stated that her rivals are the other characters that have a opposite personality of her (Mr. Rude, Miss Bossy). Means that the figure really does explain the character. There are more things that we can learn while creating a character. There are steps that we need to go through. Nathan Jurevicius says, regardless of the format, "The process of thinking up concepts always starts the same: paper, pencil, green tea... lots of thumbnails, written ideas, scratches and sketches over sketches.”

There are amounts of things that we saw but we didn't realize when it comes to designing a figure for the character and also how to differentiate a hero, sidekick and also villian by their anatomy. The shape interpret the role of a character. For instance, triangular shape is for the villian, rounded shape for the sidekick and rectangular or square shape for the hero. This is what we call dominant masses. Each character has one mass that the rest of the design “hangs off”. For instance, Genie's chest and Jafar's shoulders from Aladdin.

We might not realize this but colours also play a big part for the character design. What is the colour for the hero, what is colour for the villian, and more. For instance (case study of Superman) :

- Primary colors: Red, Yellow and Blue

- Black, purple and grey’s = Outcast/Baddies

- White, blue, pink, and yellow = innocents

Accessories are also crucial to explain your own character. These designs are supposed to explain their personality and these are the questions that will give you an idea to create the character:

1. What is the life purpose of your character? 

2. Where is he from?

3. What is your character afraid off?

4. What does he / she think about?

5. What is their main obstacle in life?

6. What is his/ her strengths and weaknesses?

7. What type of friends does he have?

If you've answered all the questions above, you're ready to create your own character.

Tutorial

Firstly we are supposed to trace a set of vormator elements that Mr.Hafiz gave. These elements are the ones that we will use  in order to create our own character.

Img.1 Vormator elements

Img.1.2 Result

Before we build the character we also learn how to cut with pen tool and how to use pathfinder. We were given a picture of a pear and we need to trace and create a shadown on it. We also learned how to put texture on the illustartion.

Img.1.3 The pear that we will trace

Img.1.4 My first attempt

Img.1.5 Blu Diablo

I chose a villian-type of character with pointy figure, triangular face shape, sharp eyes and also devil horns. The rectangle under it supposed to be the stand that needs to be cut on the wood with laser cut. Since to make the outline I created a new details in it (Since I can't change the colour of the outline to red and black). The red outline is for the one that we won't cut deeply, and the black one is to make the hole.

Img.1.6 Outline

Img.1.7 The result of laser cut

We also made our own pokemon card of our character. I'm using the fire pokemon card  template.

Img.1.8 The pokemon card

I made the background  with pen tool and took some of the vormator elements to create rocks and other details .This character version is more detailed than the one on the wood. I used Krungthep font since it's the most similar with the actual pokemon card. 

Img.1.9 Screenshot from the Adobe Illustrator

Reflection

I found that creating a character is not an easy task if we followed the steps to make a good character. Tracing is also a new challenge to me. We need to be careful or else we got the shape that we don't want.