Thursday, October 23, 2008





Last week I went and revised the characters in my story. I know, stop working on characters and get to illustrations! This is the end of character work for a while, and it was helpful for me. I learned a lot about character design this summer from combing over websites, interviews, art of books, and a very thorough book on character design for animation.

One very practical idea I gleaned from my research is that characters should not be designed in a vacuum but in a group if that's where they'll appear. So I started with the girl (probably the cutest and most innocent element of the story) and then followed with the papa monster who appears to be the most grotesque and worn of the characters. I played with scale, detail, and color in relation to each character. Putting them all in a lineup at the end was the most fun for me (even if the little monster got his foot clipped by some accident).

Right before I started work on an illustration for the savannah music festival, I experimented with how I paint things in Photoshop. The two characters under the scale chart took about 1-2 hours in Photoshop. I like my color and rendering choices but there's still room for improvement. Hopefully after I get this illustration done for competition I can devote some more hours to practice and make some nice additions to my portfolio :)