DEVELOPING FINAL CHARACTER ILLUSTRATIONS – SKYLAR

Once I had finalised Skylar’s appearance, body language and colour palette I began working towards developing more refined illustrations that would represent his final design state. These illustrations focussed a lot on the posing, and making him more ‘realistic’ in terms of portraying him as a character that embodied everything I had imagined.

I again used digital software for these illustrations and to make the character posing more accurate and less rough and experimental, used images of myself posing in the ways I wanted the character to be represented. I used a variety of poses to try and show different aspects of his personality in as many ways as I could.

Below is an example of a piece that I didn’t end up picking to be one of the final outcomes, but was the first experimentation with posing him in this way. This piece lead me to further development with my body language in later illustrations.

Following this development illustration, I knew the route I wanted to take for my final illustration process. The piece above I think was a huge step forward from my previous character development, including the more expressive pose, his signature item, the net, and his colour palette I felt really brought his whole design to life.

Below are the process pieces for the ‘final’ illustrations of Skylar’s character design.

Adding more shading plus a background element to the final illustrations helped me to render his design to a more realised stage. I think that this helped to elevate the image without it overpowering the different elements of his design. Picking a light pink for the background colour tied in with the colour palette throughout.

This pose and the use of his net I felt worked really well at capturing his personality. It is my favourite of the three final illustrations and was how I had imagined him looking from the beginning of this project.

Creating these final 3 illustrations were a way for me to show all of the elements I had worked on when creating Skylar’s design. I created them in a way that would show off his characteristics to the best of my ability. I also had the context of putting them alongside concept art and process pieces in my art book at a later stage of the project and felt that alongside the experimental work would really help show the entire development process.