Visual Language: 28th November - 4th December 2016

After completing my animation skills animation and responding to the feedback in our crit, I could then put my focus onto this character designing much more. I started fresh.

I started by going online and simply searching for some inspiration. I looked at commuters and trains and the like, and this is some of what I found. 

This kind of exercise is always pretty helpful to me. After looking at many of the stock images I gathered, I thought about the conductor doing the same thing every journey. The people could be different every time but there is always that consistency. I thought that I could do a story of the conductor. He could be going around collecting tickets as normal, but when there is someone who is taking forever to find theirs, he just snaps and throws them out of the window onto a platform. This way, I could make use of the backgrounds on platforms that I've also drawn. 

I tried to collect some more stereotypical thoughts of train conductors. What I first think of is a rather large man, maybe a bit sweaty, shirt and tie, pens in the pocket and typical conductor hat. Actually, a simple idea of what I think about goes back to the fat controller on Thomas the Tank Engine. 

As I was much happier with this idea for the character, I then went on to experiment with geometrical body shapes and silhouettes. These shapes weren't too dissimilar to what I created for my original idea. I want to go forward with the rounded shapes but I want to break away from being too close to the fat controller. I struggled with this as all my ideas seemed to be very similar. I just wasn't liking what I was making. I think that the method we had been told to use in order to develop our character just doesn't work with me. This isn't how I like to make characters so I will try to go about it how I usually do.