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Character Design

Now it was time for me to start on what Abel would look like. Marvin had already given me a solid start with his Phase 3 presentation about his character concepts. With the mood board below, I felt like I could really make some good sketches and concepts from this!

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While I did like being able to have the board that Marvin made, I also wanted to get some feel for my own ideas by making a mood board on Pinterest, as I love to do these as I really feel like they can give me some key inspiration when I am struggling to come up with concepts and certain design choices and pallets. 

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There are many common themes in this mood board with games like Nier: Automata and Detroit: Become Human. These games have proved to be quite interesting when it comes to portraying androids and robots as quintessentially human. I also added some interesting outfit looks and just other cool visual pallets. While we wanted it to be subtle that Abel is a robot, I still love compiling various visuals that make me think. in a certain headspace.

 

Once I had a think, it was time to actually start drawing. I started by splitting the character into two specific designs, the head, and the body/ outfit. This lets me not get overwhelmed by having to make full designs off the bat, so I found that if I did the designs in two phases, it would give me the best results. 

As I love drawing faces, I thought it best to begin there. I grabbed my sketchbook and started doing some designs on paper and penicl.

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Occasionally I prefer to draw traditionally as it helps me to try and upkeep my skills. I have an affinity for drawing on an iPad is what I prefer now, but I know it's always good to revisit traditional to make sure I can still do it (essentially). 

There were some designs I wasn't a fan of- like number 6, but it was really fun to experiment with different faces, hair-styles and try and see what I could come up with that could suit our Abel. I even took these designs to Marvin after I was finished with them to see which ones he liked the best, as he created Abel, I thought he could have some ideas as well towards how he imagined him.

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I personally liked, 1, 2, 3, 8, and 9 so I felt like between these we could combine and see which faces could pair well with outfit designs!

So, with the outfit designs, I thought it best to use my iPad. I am not confident in drawing full bodies and thought it best to use a shutter-stock image of a body outline when it came to drawing the clothing so I could get basic proportions. I ended up doing 12 designs and you can see these below.

I adore making outfit designs and wanted to make sure I got a wide variety of designs that were all inspired by the idea of being robotic. The clothing doesn't need to be practical as an android is typically depicted in outfits that they don't need to change or worry about affecting their ability to do their work (look at 2B from Nier). That's why I have some examples of outfits like Number 3 where the outfit is very reminiscent of The Fifth Element, specifically the outfit that Leeloo wears at the beginning of the movie. It was fun to not have to worry too much about how functional of an outfit it needed to be. I played with having it be more revealing of skin to hide as much as possible. The idea of concealing the body was concealing the second identity that we had for Abel in being a robot. 

I also did a quick example of an outfit idea for Apollo because I wanted to sketch break during the other designs to almost refresh my brain in a sense. I wanted to keep going but was running short on ideas, so I thought that if I did a design for another character within the series, it would buck up my brain to continue doing designs for Able. 

Once all 12 designs were drawn (I didn't plan an exact number, just to do 'an ample amount'), I took them to Marvin again to get his own preference to measure it against my own.

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My favorites were 4, 5, 8, 11, and 12. Like with the faces, we both had some overlap in the ones we liked and I thought that could work really when I then decided to combine ahead to an outfit to get an overall feel and theme for each version of Abel. 

At the start of doing the next stage of concepts, I started to panic. I was struggling to do a full-body pose that could showcase both the face and outfit that I had designed for Abel. Luckily, I have a friend who does art who once told me about a pose program that lets you use models to help with posing and angles called HSE: Magic Poser.

These are the poses that I ended up using for the various concepts I did for Abel. For most of the poses, I ended up changing the skin colour to something bolder so I could see through gaps and shading to make sure I didn't accidentally do any poses wrong/ make them look strange. It did massively help me as I was then able to start drawing the full body concepts without worrying if they were going to look terrible. In the end, I did 6 final designs, the last two being a later edition just before the presentation as I wanted some more variety in colour palette and style. Here the are:

As you can see, there are a lot of designs. To do these, I use Clip Studio Paint as it's the software I work the best in.

At the start, I went very much 'android' where it was very monochromatic with only a little pop of colour here and there, but towards the end, I liked the idea of there being one major feature colour, to make Abel stand out from the crowd of an android line-up and give him a little more personality. There are only base colours as I didn't want to go too over the top with shading as well as there being time constraints. It was super fun to experiment and have fun with choosing colours and styles! I also used a skin colour pallet to help me with the skin tones as I struggle to colour pick, so having the option to get a resource that gave me over 50-ish shades was incredible.

Some of the outfits were a little complicated to draw, especially the third design with the trousers. I also had to end up thinking about things practically and this also came up with a conversation I had with Marvin where we said that capes may be difficult as animating them in pixel art could be a little more than we could handle. I personally loved all of them but the third one, but for practicality to animate and make into pixel art, it would be between the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. Marvin personally loved the 4th design, but I will also be doing a poll in Slack to get responses from classmates to fully choose which one we should go forward with. For now, we are using Design 3 as our 'place-holder'.

In the next stage (Semester 2) I will be fully going into what art style to choose, For now, I have some rough ideas of style in the form is this image. 

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Due to time constraints, there is no colour, but I decided to get styles from artists both me and Marvin liked just to see what styles might look good for any potential splash art and/ or narrative if we have the character interacting with himself. 


This art is SUPER rough and I am NOT happy with it at all. I was getting to a point of burn-out at this point with the designs and ended up really struggling to get down anything that I really liked. Thus, I will be continuing to do a bit more on the development of the art style and which character to go forward within Semester 2- so any future notes on this will be in my Notion,

Overall, I had a lot of fun designing everything and have definitely learned a lot about designing and ways to make it easier for myself and those who will give feedback.

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