Visual Language: 9th - 15th January 2017

Over the Christmas break, I'll admit they I didn't get as much done as I would have liked. I did some more research work and a bit on my character design. 

I started to refine my character much more. I still wasn't completely happy with it but I stuck it out and I am actually growing to like him the more I draw him. I moved on to creating my sketches on Photoshop. This was I had more freedom to play around and tweak as needed. I can just keep playing around with proportions to create something I liked. 

Doing this worked so much better for me and I quickly started to like my character. I did try a slight costume variation but then decided that I didn't really like it as it didn't look as identifiable as a train conductor. I am very happy with the small detail of adding a ripple chin. This was something that I just started adding in my last few sketches but I really like it. It gives some more visual interest and adds to the silhouette of the character. 

Once I was happy with my design, I then started working on the t pose character sheet. This is something that I always really liked doing because it's the first time that the character comes together properly. I did this in Photoshop to again give me more flexibility. I started with the geometric shapes, then a sketch version of the character and then the final line work. 

The colour was added layer by layer on a clipping mask that filled the shape of the character, this let me easily alter any of the colours of individual elements. By also creating the shading on a layer above on 30% opacity, I could still play around with the colours and the shading would automatically change with the base tone.

The final colours are actually the ones that originally came to mind. This is influenced by the uniforms the conductors on the northern rail trains that I get on. I did a hand full of colour variations to try and see if I liked any others but in the end the first was still my favourite.

For creating the other poses, I copied the base shapes from the original sketch and created the profile view first. I find that doing the front and profile views before the 2/3 or 3/4 views is much better to manage and keep proportions. This is because I can then create the middle pose as I would do an inbetween frame. I lowered the opacity of the previous angles and just drew in between. 

I am actually really happy with how this design has turned out. I think was hard for me to get into to begin with because I felt like I was doing the process backwards since we had to create a character from the backgrounds we drew. I grew to like it the more I drew it but I do still think it would have been more natural and easier to be invested in if it were done in the order of thinking up an idea for a story before starting to just design the elements outright. I am looking forward to creating the animated turnaround next.