Intro to the making of Media City, Week 5: Model sheets and turnaround sheets intro in character design
The focus of this weeks session of intro to the making of was on character design model sheets and turnarounds this was yet another element that seemed natural to me as I design and redesign characters all the time for my own or fan comics for my blog, but what I didn't know was that there was more to it than what I thought. Last week we were told to design characters with the idea of devils and demons using a mood board on Pinterest or stick images into our sketchbooks as seen below.
Pinterest board research:
Inked rough sketches:
This was the opportunity to work on developing a character from one of my own stories that I named the Child of Light, said character was the main antagonist of the story that I named The Brother of Shadows. The back story of this character is he used to be one of the guardians of the natural world order of Zordinia but he wanted more as he stepped further into the dark shadow, and to encompass the world in shadow he killed his sibling the Sister of light but although her body was destroyed her essence was sent away to a distant land to be kept safe from her brother as the world fell into shadow.
This was a story that I had on the back-burner for months after coming up with it in college, so a chance to develop it was very fortunate. The back story would be used to help us to move into the next stage of the project which was model sheets and turnarounds which was a process of designing characters in films or comics. There were several principles to doing these sheets such as Solid drawing which Annabeth said was an element from How to Draw Comics the Marvel way which was a book that I was very familiar with. The idea being that it takes into account different forms of three dimensional space or giving the characters volume and weight this is mainly universal.
There are different perspectives to the characters such as the front view, back view and a three quarter view in turnaround sheets and much like life drawing we could use guidance lines to account for the height and head heights of the character an aspect that I was familiar with from college life drawing and have tried to incorporate this in my own drawing work. We could push this further by introducing animation to our turnarounds much like many animations like Disney or Dreamworks, but one element would be sculpting the characters from clay which was something that I recognised from behind the scenes footage of Disney films like the Incredibles or Robots and I always wondered what they were for. Annabeth told me they would be used for digital scanning which reminded me of how the method was used to bring the dinosaurs back to life in documentaries like Walking with Dinosaurs or Prehistoric Park.
These were linked to creative play also as we would be using the maker space in later phases of the project such as our city project for example. There were several thing that we needed to avoid such as twinning which meant not making them look mirrored or they wouldn't be of use in the project, but to add more to the piece we could add a more dynamic pose to the character such as twisting the body to make it look more appealing to the views much like promotional art for things such as Voltron Legendary Defender or Tangled the series. This was an act called contrapposto which meant the angle of the hips and shoulders tilting in opposite directions to help give balance to the body an example of this was within the structure of cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny.
In some of our drawings we could use silhouettes rather than intricate detailing on the characters, and also when doing a model sheet it was a good idea to focus on elements like the head for expressions and feelings on the face given what scene they're staring in.
So we set to work and I instantly immersed myself into drawing model sheets and turnarounds for my character and I also had a turnaround for one of my own characters the Lone Watcher to help me on this process. Remembering elements from life drawing I used guide lines from the head to map out the different positions of the body, as well as the head and since the character was a simple cloaked person it was a curved rectangular shaped body with a pointed head (look below)
Turnarounds, model sheet and poses.
When inking my character I used the element of crosshatching to capture the darkness element of this demon being and studying from my initial sketches and experience with drawing hoods I was able to create an element that could shade the characters face from view and sight. Even doing poses that fitted this characters personality and intentions such as corrupting people, raising them from the dead and using them to his own designs which was an element referred to as the deal with the devil. When looking at my sketching work Annabeth suggested that I should look into demonic cowls to get a better idea on drawing a figure wearing a hood and cloak over his body and considering he was a creature made of shadowed flames I decided to create a Pinterest board based on cowls and cloaks so that I could get a better idea of doing it (as shown above second sketch on the right.)
From this session I could tell that I was off to a rolling start even learning new things that could help my development in character drawing, perspective and even doing concept art for animation or comic books. Elements such as the pose line that could help angle the character for elements like running or in a fighting pose elements that I may practice over the weekend or in my spare time.
Pinterest board research:
Inked rough sketches:
This was a story that I had on the back-burner for months after coming up with it in college, so a chance to develop it was very fortunate. The back story would be used to help us to move into the next stage of the project which was model sheets and turnarounds which was a process of designing characters in films or comics. There were several principles to doing these sheets such as Solid drawing which Annabeth said was an element from How to Draw Comics the Marvel way which was a book that I was very familiar with. The idea being that it takes into account different forms of three dimensional space or giving the characters volume and weight this is mainly universal.
There are different perspectives to the characters such as the front view, back view and a three quarter view in turnaround sheets and much like life drawing we could use guidance lines to account for the height and head heights of the character an aspect that I was familiar with from college life drawing and have tried to incorporate this in my own drawing work. We could push this further by introducing animation to our turnarounds much like many animations like Disney or Dreamworks, but one element would be sculpting the characters from clay which was something that I recognised from behind the scenes footage of Disney films like the Incredibles or Robots and I always wondered what they were for. Annabeth told me they would be used for digital scanning which reminded me of how the method was used to bring the dinosaurs back to life in documentaries like Walking with Dinosaurs or Prehistoric Park.
These were linked to creative play also as we would be using the maker space in later phases of the project such as our city project for example. There were several thing that we needed to avoid such as twinning which meant not making them look mirrored or they wouldn't be of use in the project, but to add more to the piece we could add a more dynamic pose to the character such as twisting the body to make it look more appealing to the views much like promotional art for things such as Voltron Legendary Defender or Tangled the series. This was an act called contrapposto which meant the angle of the hips and shoulders tilting in opposite directions to help give balance to the body an example of this was within the structure of cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny.
In some of our drawings we could use silhouettes rather than intricate detailing on the characters, and also when doing a model sheet it was a good idea to focus on elements like the head for expressions and feelings on the face given what scene they're staring in.
So we set to work and I instantly immersed myself into drawing model sheets and turnarounds for my character and I also had a turnaround for one of my own characters the Lone Watcher to help me on this process. Remembering elements from life drawing I used guide lines from the head to map out the different positions of the body, as well as the head and since the character was a simple cloaked person it was a curved rectangular shaped body with a pointed head (look below)
From this session I could tell that I was off to a rolling start even learning new things that could help my development in character drawing, perspective and even doing concept art for animation or comic books. Elements such as the pose line that could help angle the character for elements like running or in a fighting pose elements that I may practice over the weekend or in my spare time.
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