Unit 1: Practice Based Research

Starting on Character Design, I think one of the most fundamental things in designing characters is to have a grasp on anatomy and movement. While I started with a good foundation in proportions and anatomy, I was struggling to capture the flow and movement of a subject in motion. Vanessa’s life drawing classes have really taught me how to draw what the model was doing, not what the model looked like.

Here is a comparison of two life drawings from October 2023 to February 2024:

Putting these two side by side, I can see that in the more recent drawing, I had much more confidence in putting down lines and not going over the same strokes over and over – making the drawing look flat and static – as demonstrated in the first image.

Going into the character design work, I took into consideration shape and silhouette. I wanted a simple yet recognizable design that reflects my character’s personality. My character is an alien android that’s infiltrating Earth – disguised as a human. So I started off with sketching out a very normal male figure:

The initial silhouettes were too boring, even though it was relevant to my character traits. I needed to somehow make a seemingly normal and bland character differ from your everyday Joe. I went straight into sketching the details of my character. My character is friendly but dangerous when provoked, so I gave him a smiley expression along with some sharp elements to his appearance.

Moving on from drawing life models, we did a little workshop on perspective drawing. We were taught to use basic shapes like rectangles and cylinders as placeholders for limbs and other body parts to better understand how things appear smaller or bigger depending on your perspective.

Using what I’ve learned from life drawing PLUS the technical drawing workshops, I sketched out some exaggerated character poses. I incorporated three different angles to the poses:

For the Silent Film and Body Acting practice, I chose Felix’s character to animate. Felix’s character was similar to mine in some aspects – minimal, sharp, angular, and reserved…to an extent. I sketched out a quick storyboard of what I think would encapsulate her character:

I also drew some character expressions for the animation. The character’s traits were cold, emotionless, and distant, so it was challenging to sketch out facial expressions for her.

My storyboard demonstrated my understanding of movement and acting, but it was a little short, so I added a little more anticipation and action into the final animation.