Exercise 6 - Character Design
It is time to go back to the outline (Exercise 1.1), the short story (Exercise 2.2), and the storyboard (Project 1) you have created in previous exercises to develop your character design.
To design your character you will need to be attentive to:
The main traits of your character and how you can represent them through, for example, shape, color, clothing, props.
The way your character will move, as detailed in Lesson 6.
Keep in mind that great animations have great characters that are relatable. To achieve that, the design of your character doesn’t need to be complex, but it needs to be memorable.
Guidelines
Based on your outline (Exercise 1.1), short story (Exercise 2.2), and storyboard (Project 1) design the main character for you animation. Make your character as detailed as possible, thinking about all the elements necessary to convey its personality, keeping in mind this may also change from the beginning to the end of its journey.
As part of this exercise you will create a character sheet depicting your character in four distinct views: front, back, side and posed.
Steps to completion
The first step will be to create a basic sketch for your main character by hand, or using Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop. What are your character’s main physical characteristics? What are its main personality traits, and how can you convey those through its physical appearance?
Refer back to your outline to remember how you first envisioned your character or, if your character has changed since then, create a new outline you can follow to ground your design process.
Redraw your character as many times as needed. Designing a good character takes more than one iteration, so allow yourself enough time to try different things. By the end of this stage you should have a few versions of your character, so you can pick your favourite details as you move on to the next step.
Build your character using Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop.
Carefully think through all the details of your character, imagining how they could be later animated (for example, how can a piece of clothing or hair move differently as your character walks, runs, or jumps?). Being attentive to movement at this stage will help you design a strong character that can be more easily animated later in the process. Refer back to your storyboard (Project 1) to think about how your character will move.
Remember, each element that will be animated needs to be in a separate layer.
Prepare one sheet with your character depicted in four distinct views (front, back, side and posed) using Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop.
Take a final closer look into your character design and make any necessary adjustments.
Save your final character sheet as a .pdf file following this naming convention:
art204_exercise6_lastname_firstname.pdf
Post your final character sheet to the course page.