Appeal - Character Design - 07/10/19

This seminar taught us about the appeal of a character, which is the animated equivalent of an actor’s charisma. Essentially, an appealing character conveys its personality through both its visual design and its movements. A key point is that simple is appealing.

To create an appealing character, we first came up with its backstory and personality. I found this quite challenging as it was hard to think of an original idea, however once I focused on individual features in the mindmap rather than trying to think of a whole story for the character, it became much easier and allowed more possibilities. I definitely feel I could have simplified Creak much more however, and was too focused on the story.

I used the character sheet as a template to then sketch ideas of how Creak may look. I had quite a good idea of his appearance from the description, however I found that some things that worked on paper didn’t work visually, so the designs never met all the points of the character sheet. I enjoyed this part however I felt I could have done a lot more designs, especially with the body.

I then started to create the turnaround, which I found quite challenging to make bigger and correctly proportioned. In the end I changed the design of the body to make it more angular, because the first design was too complicated and didn’t show enough character. I like how the front and back poses turned out, but I found the side view very challenging, and I felt the shoulders of the 3/4 pose are too skewed.

Finally I created the expression sheet which I found quite hard to convey the right emotion without reference. The solid drawing exercise really helped with the poses of this character, and I really liked how they turned out, however I feel the character’s expressions could have been pushed more, especially the angle of the head.