ANUSHKA’S DIGITAL CREATIONS

Category: Breaking Character

  • BREAKING CHARACTER — 03/10/25

    In this lesson, Jess taught us about the fundamentals of character sheets, expression sheets and character turnarounds.

    Character sheets: used to both communicate personality and depict the movement of the character.

    Expression Sheets: shows character expressing a variety of emotions, helps keep the character acting consistent

    Character turnaround: displays a 360 degree view of the character to keep appearance consistent from all angles. Usually only includes front, back and sides, but can include 3/4 angles as well.

    My notes

    Jess then taught us how to use Photoshop to draw our characters, a software that I’ve only ever used for editing photos back in A-Level Art & Design. I used to find its user interface very complex, and barely knew how to navigate through it without using Google to research something I searched up a hundred times before. But Jess explained how to use every feature so well, and I actually enjoyed drawing my character on Photoshop. I ended up changing his design to make his eyes square (a play on “square eyes”, a saying that people often use when someone spends a lot of time staring at a screen). This fits his character perfectly, as he’s a computer mouse used in the office, and differentiates him more from wireless mouse, who would have rounder eyes akin to Mouse’s original design.

    My character on Photoshop

    I tried adding colour but Photoshop kept glitching, so I had to ask a tech to help me. I ended up moving to another computer but the same error occurred, and so I gave up and decided to just use Clip Studio Paint (my usual software) instead.

    For next week, we were told to start creating character sheets, expression sheets and character sheets of our characters. I finished everything during the weekend, making sure I had as many poses in my character sheet to explore Mouse’s movement, his emotions in the expression sheet (which are more limited because he’s an office mouse that’s been consistently used), and that angle of his was the same height in the turnaround sheet.

    Mouse’s character sheet (updated)

    Mouse’s expression sheet

    Mouse’s turnaround sheet

    I also made a test animation of Mouse from the character turnaround sheet, using a well known meme as the background and adding my own twist at the end for comedic effect.

    PLEASE NOTE: Increasing the volume is advised for a better viewing experience. Annoyingly, the audio isn’t matching up with the video (which wasn’t happening until I uploaded the video for some reason), but enjoy nonetheless.

  • BREAKING CHARACTER — 01/10/25

    We were in a different room on this day so that we could experiment more with character design using found materials and mixed media.

    Jess gave us a task at first, which was to go on Word Hippo and find adjectives (and their synonyms) to describe our character, and pick 3 of them (these will be used as character descriptors that we can then refer to when designing and animating them later on). I picked a plethora of adjectives, as shown in my notes below:

    Mouse adjectives

    The 3 character descriptors I ended up choosing later on were:

    1. Ambitious
    2. Hot-headed
    3. Insecure.

    We were taught about more ways to design our character, thinking about how shape, colour, line, lighting, materiality and texture can affect the perceptions that people may have about the character’s personality.

    We then partook in an activity where we made our characters using materials in the room. I used foam and cut a polygon for the body, cut out paper for the eyes and stuck newspaper cut-outs (camera lenses of the new iPhone) as the pupils on top, molded polymer clay as the ears and stuck on string as the tail.

    I really liked the slow pace that the rotation seemed to be going in so far. It was fun unwinding and experimenting with designs for our characters using random craft materials.

    I wanted to expand the premise of computer mice becoming actual mice when people leave the room (like in Toy Story), but I didn’t like the idea of it being a race between mice from different ages, as I kept trying to make it too complex and adding different species (e.g. the first computer mouse = a rat etc.). Therefore, I decided to limit myself to 2 characters as per the brief, and brainstormed two computer mice that are complete polar opposites (both in appearance and personality), that compete to eat human food that has been left on the other side of the desk.

    My ideas for the characters were as follows:

    • Wired Mouse:
      • The character I’m currently designing and developing.
      • Ambitious, hot-headed, insecure.
      • An office mouse that is bored by his “office job” and has a dream to eat human food (specifically cheese), not caring about whether it’s even wired to eat human food. Its plans keep being thwarted by a cheeky wireless mouse, who just wants his attention (and wants to keep annoying him because he’s easy to provoke).
      • Wired Mouse doesn’t like Wireless Mouse purely because it’s wireless, and Wired Mouse feels envious as he sees his tail/wire as a liability, he’s constantly plugged to a computer that is essentially his life support, while Wireless Mouse can zip around without a tail.
    • Wireless Mouse:
      • An idea for an additional character that I have yet to make.
      • Energetic, cheeky, ???
      • A newer office mouse that has a battery powered invisible tail which isn’t actually connected to anything. He wants to befriend Wired Mouse, but finds getting on his nerves much more fun.

    I ended up not wanting to pursue Wireless Mouse’s character, instead shifting my focus onto developing the Wired Mouse since it would be much simpler for me to handle. After all, this was a new experience for me and while I wanted to challenge myself, I also felt now wasn’t the time to take huge risks and possibly have no time to finish anything.

    That night, I got started with making a character sheet for Mouse (a placeholder name for my character until I find another name), and so I made a super rough version of one that you can see below:

  • BREAKING CHARACTER — 29/09/25

    I was the most excited for this rotation and making character as I love character design and making character sheets in my free time, but it would be pretty limited art-style wise. Before joining university, I was accustomed to drawing realism and semi-realism, and my subjects were often my favourite K-pop idols. Therefore, I really wanted to broaden my artstyle and try my hand at a more cartoonish and free style that wouldn’t restrict me in any way.

    At the beginning of the lesson, Jess instructed us to write our goals for this rotation. I wrote the following:

    “I want to find my own artstyle and build my confidence when drawing original characters with distinct personalities that all have a purpose to a story. I also want to try simplifying my characters instead of creating extremely complex ones.”

    We then went through a quick fire activity, in which we had to draw the object closest to us in a short amount of time. I chose a computer mouse as my object simply because it was the first object I saw, but this really helped in the long run, even if I didn’t know it at the time. The following prompts were:

    • With dominant (left) hand:
    • As a person:
    • With non-dominant (right) hand:
    • Simplifying object into a few shapes + redrawing what the person next to you drew:

    This was a fun activity that prompted me to act fast and use my imagination in such a short period of time. I especially found the personification of my object to be an interesting task that took some time to figure out, but I am happy with the result.

    Our next task was to write a few stories that we would then use for the following days to develop characters with. I devised 4 stories that ranged in complexity as I wasn’t sure how detailed they would have to be. In each section, I will include a brief summary of what I wanted the story to be and my messy notes that accompany it:

    • A possible revenge story about the solar system being nobles (with the Sun as a monarch?) that ousted Pluto from its elite circle. Pluto then takes its revenge. (Unfinished + unrefined.)
    • Detective story about the main character having dreams where they enter the lives of any random person that they bumped into during the day (it’s basically randomly generated). They dream about someone they know getting murdered/maimed brutally, but obviously they don’t remember who the killer was as they live in a big, crowded city. The person ends up in a missing person’s report and the character has to solve who murdered them through their dreams? (Unfinished + unrefined.)
    • Main character needs to get to another class before time runs out, but their superpower randomly activates at the wrong time, causing them to shrink.
    • Mario Kart except with computer mice (told you the mouse drawing would come in handy!). Battle between different mice from different periods of time.

    My notes on the tasks

    At that point in time I felt stuck, and I didn’t really know which story I wanted to pursue for the next two weeks, although I knew it wouldn’t be the first two ideas as they were far too complex/I wasn’t satisfied with them.

    Jess then taught us about design elements (contrast, balance, emphasis + proportion, movement), and how they would help establish and strengthen the design of our characters.

    Meanwhile, I doodled concepts of what my characters from the last 2 story ideas could look like. I was leaning more towards the tiny person concept more at first, but realised I couldn’t visualise the character’s design in my head as well as I could for the computer mouse story. Therefore, I ended up sticking with the latter.

    Initial designs in my notebook

    Our homework for Wednesday was to create as many character designs for one of the story ideas using a variety of media. This would be for one or two characters (depending on what fit the story best) and had to vary in colour, texture and all 4 design elements.

    I worked on the designs on Tuesday, expanding upon the computer mouse idea to create 12 pages of drawings, plus some 3D work (as shown below). This task was so fun, as I challenged myself to use media that I’m not particularly a fan of (i.e. collage, found objects), and ended up loving the process (especially the found object piece, where I found fallen objects/stones while walking my dogs and stuck them together using a glue gun).

    My 2D designs for Wednesday

    My 3D designs for Wednesday