The character design challenge is an artist facebook group that sets themes and challenges every month for artists to design characters. Even though it's a facebook group - the thing that sets the CDC out from other similar ones is that the page is run by artists, who get acclaimed artists and art directors to judge the submissions every month. The person who 'wins' the monthly theme gets feedback/mentoring and other goodies by the judge of the month, which makes it a nice little challenge to take part in.
This was the first entry I made - for their November 'Greek Gods and Goddesses' theme. I chose to draw Hestia - who is the Greek Goddess of the Home and Hearth.
Because a lot of her 'symbolism' is in warmth, fire, and homeliness (she was kind of regarded as a bit of a protector/goddess for housewives) - I wanted to make her design literally look like a flame. However I also wanted to sway away from looking too much like The Flame Princess from Adventure Time, who is also a 'flame' inspired character, like this:
I gave hestia a larger build to reflect the silhouette of a flame more - and I gave her a more 'earthy' colour palette to give more of a feel of homeliness to her.
I have mixed feelings about it because I don't think its the strongest character design i've ever done - her pose is really stiff, I think her face could have drawn a lot better. My technique of drawing shapes and adding texture to them digitally has moved on a lot more since doing this - but I do like the texture, its probably one of my favourite parts. I think this was a turning point in my practice, because this is where I realised I didn't have to rely so much on heavy black digital line work as much.
Fast-forward to March - this is what I did for their 'Legend of Zelda' monthly theme! Here I chose to redesign Midna - one of the characters from the game 'Twilight Princess'. In the story, Midna is a ruler of the 'Twilight realm', who gets turned into an imp and banished to the protaganist Link's world by someone called Zant, who is jealous of her and wants to rule instead.
As a point of reference, this is what Midna and Zant look like in the game:
I really like Midna as a character - she's really funny and sarcastic, but I feel that there is a marked difference in her character design compared to the other Twili characters you see (like zant) who are much darker, a lot creepier to look at. Whilst her beauty is a large plot point, I wanted to create a look for Midna that firstly wasn't a glorified sarong (not that theres anything wrong with that) - but also reflected her more as a leader, and made her look more powerful.
I wanted to give her a big, shadowy cloak that covered her entirely. The twilight realm in-game looks a bit like this: covered in shadows, with hints of light around it, and I wanted her clothing to reflect this. Midna's original design is very curvaceous - and even her imp form is made up of round shapes. I wanted to make her as sharp to look at as possible - with lots of edges to her cloak and points.
From an image perspective - I think this looks much stronger than the Hestia one does, and you can see how my work has improved between the November of last year and the March of this year. I feel like i'm starting to understand and work with shape a lot better, and trying to simplify my images as much as possible is making a good impact.
From a character design perspective - I still have a lot of work to do. I think this is a better silhouette and pose than the Hestia one, Midna definitely looks more powerful in it but I do think that this isn't a practical design - especially for a character in a video game. More exploration with physics in mind could make it so - but this is very much an illustration of a character than it is a character 'design', which a lot of the CDC entries tend to be.
I've repeatedly come under criticism for the way I draw characters on the course, but I do think i have teeth and skills in character design still, its something that I just have to hone a lot more. I think this challenge will prove to be something useful to explore character more with when I leave the course in June.
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