Character Design - Making the Character

When designing my character I decided to go for one that really appealed to myself, especially one I wouldn't lose interest in half-way through the process and one that I could look forward to creating rather than just dragging out like a chore. When we were first issued our brief in September I was already very hyped up for the spooky season of October to come and had a lot of witchy influences (from reading Wiccan and witchy books). I had settled on the idea of a Garden Witch residing in the heart of folklore mythology, Ireland. Before I had even considered her background in detail I did a couple of doodles to really get a feel for her and because I was very excited to vent my latest witchy-finds in character form. When I had eventually gotten around to filling in details about her I started to gather more and more of a mental image until I could start applying all these details to her on paper. Before I started making anymore concepts I had to reflect on my research and develop a style fitting of her and experiment similar techniques and styles. I was very inspired by artists in No Brow and a few from the Pictoplasma website. Artists that really caught my eye was Will Morris, Zosia Dzierzawska, Bianca Bagnarelli, Helen Jo and Mikkel Sommer.


               

 

I was very interested in trying something outside of my comfort zone and the traditional methods they applied to their work was something I felt like I could work towards and learn from. Techniques such as ink and inkwash as well as watercolours. I felt as though traditional techniques would also be a really nice approach to my themes (vintage, old-fashioned). I did a couple of tests with lines using regular fineliners and quill and ink, tests with colours including inkwash, watercolour and even coffee. And then took those tests on to fancy Fabriano paper. This was a good base to arrange my workflow and time schedule. When working on my dynamic poses I paired up with my friend Katie to make a list of the different poses we would like to make before shooting. After we had captured pictures of the poses we printed them out in black and white and traced over them on the light box.

        

When I had built up confidence to use the quill and ink I set off to to do the lines for my turnaround and dynamic poses on the light box over my under sketch on Fabriano paper. When I had completed this task I scanned it in to fix the nit-picky mistakes, colour and shading on Photoshop.

This is where my my work started to run dry.

After skimming over the brief I had realized that whilst applying colour to my piece that when I was working on A3 I should have really been working on A2. While I felt this could have been fixed had I been working on a vector based program such as Adobe Illustrator,  I had been using Photoshop which when scaled starts to appear more pixelated. After confronting my tutor about this mistake, we agreed that I would go on to make two turnarounds sized at A3 to make-up for the size difference. This definitely increased my work-load and where I was on perfect time and making good headway I started falling behind and over-complicating her design and written background.

I also later found that because of the change in my schedule and work-load I had to start cutting corners, making things look rushed, lacklustre and not that of a HE student going in to her second year. The development was looking spotty in regards to my final piece(s), not relating to anything I said I was interested pursuing and making my turnarounds look very uninformed. It's not something I can honestly take pride in and for this I am really disappointed.