WEEK 2 | Character Design

On the second week of our rotation our task was to create character design based on given prompt, mine was “Winter”.

I started from building character from basic shapes. I created various designs, but I liked particularly one of them. Head was a circle, to show positive mindset, as I planned on making main character. The body consist of squares, becoming wider at the bottom to emphasize heavy silhouette. This shows strength and coldness of personality that I could build.

For clothes my first associations were baggy, warm clothes, winter boots and overall winter season clothes, so I decided to give them to my character.

I also used previous shapes to create other characters of this story out of interest.

As I was creating characters, story came to my mind as well as the setting and premise. Narrative takes place at the small village in Russia, where after melting of glaciers, various unknown monsters started emerging. Main character’s name is “Vlad” (whose name was inspired by my friend) that came to village from Moscow to get rid of the monsters there, as someone who got powers after being bitten by a monster. His power is summoning axe that can kill dangerous outlanders. That’s why I made his clothes more modern to stand out from other villagers and make statement that he is from city.

After, I tried various colour pallets before choosing the one that got from light to dark colour from top to bottom. This illustrates Vlad’s strength, lightheaded, but tough personality.

I hesitated to create character with cold, mostly unemotional eyes, as well as mainly not shown mouth, but I thought it suits him the most as someone whom I associate with “winter”.

This is the final sketch before I proceeded to make final version.