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