Character Design - Visual Development

This is what the first 3 weeks of being back at Ringling has yielded. The project was to create 3 characters, a villain, a hero, and a support.  One character had to be a female, male, and a robot. The robot character had to show functionality and could not be put off as something that was powered by magic. We could use any genre we wanted and we were to write short stories about our character and there traits.

Story:  The male hero, once a simple farmer lived with his lovely wife by the nearby kingdom. But misfortunate happened a when an unexplained energy erupted from the castle and enveloped his home. He tried to save his wife but only his hand entered the energy before he was knocked unconscious. He awoke in the chambers of the castle, a week later to find his home and wife missing and his hand that had entered the energy was now scarred and blackened.  He found out that the energy was black magic, which the castle was involved, has now transformed his wife into witch of terrible power and alongside her, a sadistic being capable of ripping foes apart. He is now tasked to track her done and put her to rest forever.

Hero: Male mid 30’s, physically strong, Mostly leather armor, on the brink of madness, when he gained powers acquired marks on right arm that allows magic but risky. Grim personality tries to be good. Uses swords and daggers.

Villain: Female late 20’s, witch build, uses magic to her advantage. Very cunning and sly, still very beautiful, lost who she was (hero’s wife) and remember nothing of whom she used to be. Cloth armor and still mostly looks like her former self.

Support: Sadistic Spirit trapped in an animate body and was imprisoned. Freed by Villain and now helps her sow chaos and discord.

For the first part of the project, we had to do 15 silhouettes for each character.

Hero

Support

Villain

Second part was was to make 5 rough sketches of the selected character and 3 expressions of the each character. The robot character also had to have one callout. (Special feature) I had trouble picking two of the silhouettes for the villain so I tried them both.

The next part was developing 3 color roughs of the the selected costume for the character. Some revisions were made on each character. I was struggling with the robot character because it was not showing the mechanical features of a functional robot.

The last part of the project was to take one of the characters and finalize it. Make a full model sheet including a turnaround, a full rendered version of the character and it's expression or the callout if it's the robot. My teacher choose the robot character (yay....) so I redid the character, developed the turnaround and redid the callout. It still needs some touch ups so I will be revisiting this project again to touch it up.

Overall this was a really fun project and I enjoyed it immensely. I really learned a lot from this and can't wait to move on to the next project! :)