To develop onwards with my character design, now that I had a beginning idea of what Skylar’s appearance and colour theory – through the instagram poll research- was going to be, I needed to work out the rest of his design. I wanted to explore his clothing, body language and different ways that I could capture his personality and the qualities I had imagined for him.
As a starting point I began some rough full body sketches, body language is something that can really show who a character is, before they are interacted with, therefore I wanted to look at this. I also wanted to play with his physical proportions and how this would emphasise this. Below shows the beginning experimentation with his body langauge.
The final body sketch showed the first experimentation with his clothing design. I wanted his clothing to be light, comfortable and soft looking, to match his appearance and characteristics. It was important for me that all elements of his design were connected, that everything had meaning. Therefore I then used this sketch to explore his colour palette.
I wanted to use soft colours to match those in his hair, creating enough contrast that the pieces were individual but that they worked harmoniously in terms of aesthetic. I also thought about how his clothing would look in his surroundings, considering all these small details helped me to come up with his colour scheme. Below shows the sketch process of the first coloured clothing sketch of Skylar.
In this piece you can also see the hair colour that I chose to take from my Instagram poll research. I chose the blue and pink tones as out of the two that had the most votes, this was the one I preferred.
Once I knew what I wanted Skylar’s overall appearance to look like, I began to experiment with some expression studies, to try and see how I could use my sketches to develop more than one side to the character. I took inspiration from my previous art book research for this. Below are the expression sketches I created.
I then used the newly generated colour palette to transform these sketches into more rendered versions of the character, to see how well his personality ties with the colours and textures I had used. This expression sheet was the first time I felt all the elements of his design working together, I felt that his character had a solid personality that I now knew how to capture.
As previously mentioned in my character profiles, and explored in my BFG research, my role for Skylar’s character in my narrative is to collect dreams using a large net. I personally love it when fantasy characters have a signature feature / weapon / item that they carry around at all times, so much so that their design seems lost without it. Therefore I began to draw some quick concept sketches of Skylar with his net, to practise implementing it into his final design.
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