Visual Language: 16th - 22nd January 2017

This week was quite heavy with finishing off all my character design stuff. I loved doing the animated character turnaround. I loved to be animating again.

I did some research into industry turnarounds and character sheets. I love looking at this kind of thing because it's really interesting to see how the characters started out and what the animators used as reference to make sure the character is consistent. The most important thing from any of these kinds of character turnaround sheets is the proportions. The character needs to always look like the same person. 

I used Adobe Animate to create this as it is a program I am comfortable with and it allows me flexibility in my drawing. I can still tweak and edit things much easier. I used a circular guide on the ground to base my perspectives from. At first this was a bit tricky but being able to tweak proportions as I go really helped and I did soon get the hang of it and all my guides were incredibly useful and really sped up my workflow. 

I planned this out quite extensively by first creating a shape skeleton version, then a sketch version and then the final line work. This let me make sure that everything looked correct before moving on to more detail. This worked really well for me as I believe I have managed to create the three dimensional look of the character staying in proportion. 

I'm really happy with my finished turnaround. I've not done an animated turnaround before now. I've usually just done front, 2/3 and side as my turnarounds so this was really fun to make. Also it was just great to actually do some animation again. 

Through the rest of the week I started work on the pose and the expression sheets. I found it difficult to think of poses that this character could do. With him being so big and round, it made it hard for me to actually create poses because there isn't much room for him to move. This is something that I didn't think about when designing him and I think that while is immovability does tie in with the kind of character he is because of his shape, it does restrict him rather a lot. His face is less restrictive allowing me to create a greater range of facial expressions though I feel like his character would be grumpy most of the time so I wanted to also try and communicate that in different ways too.