As the second partition of the testing testing! workshops began, I decided that exploration of characters and designing would be a good skill to experiment with and possibly push towards my character designs for my final major project during pre-production. I was rather excited as I’m not entirely confident with my digital work so I challenged myself to focus on the tasks of this workshop digitally, Clip Studio Paint being my go-to program.
Ryan was extremely straightforward and to the point when setting the tasks during the first session once he introduced the basis of the workshop. The first task we were assigned appeared to be very simple, create blobs on a page and use the blobs to create characters with, focusing on the shape, my work for this task is below.
My characters created from the blobs/shapes for the first task
The second task of the first session was about silhouettes, Ryan presented the class with three images of different characters and the blacked out silhouettes, challenging us to recreate them with more dynamic and exciting silhouettes. These tasks allowed me to experiment with poses and designs, and not having to worry too much about extreme details. Once we completed the tasks within a specific time limit we were given a task for the second session, which will be discussed in another post!
Three silhouettes for a Soldier, Cowboy and a Lady holding an umbrella
Once we completed the silhouettes, we were then instructed to create four characters based on four different shapes: circle, rectangle, triangle and square. Additionally to this, we were given four different types of jobs to assign to these shapes and a time limit on how long we could spend designing these characters. The characters were a baker, swimmer, thief and builder.
My designs for the baker, swimmer and builder.