Over week 2 of the easter break I worked on the character sketches, colourways and turnaround for my dancer character Elise. I had first finished my character sketches and used pinterest to study ideas for sketching and even possible future ideas to pursue for the feature length novel. Some sketches of interest were of Elise running with her hair down and in her normal attire this gave me an idea to do some colour ways ideas for her other costumes and attire for sections of the story.
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| Elise sketches and Colourways sample piece. |
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| sketches using life drawing work. |
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| sketches using life drawing ideas. |
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| Sketches and ideas. |
I created a turnaround and started with the colour ways sampling to get an idea on possible colours. However as with Joseph I looked to my character description sheets for ideas and see if I could try to stay true to some of my original ideas. One of which was the colour of her eyes namely blue and her fur being a shade of blue and white as thats the fur of the cat she's based on, the Serrade Petit Cat. The colours I added were that particular shade whilst her hair was raven black, her attire was a simple ballet dress with gold linings. Once completed this was put through a colour ways sampling sheet.
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| Colour ways sheet for Elise. |
I copied the original piece into layers then using the hue, saturation and luminosity option as before I altered the colours. However I wanted to maintain the idea of her blue eyes and so I coloured them on a separate layer to make sure they weren't affected. Many results came from the colour ways, however some seemed a little too colourful such as the bright green. I felt it didn't seem like an appropriate colour to use for a 19th century themed story. There were some good elements such as the darker purple necklace jam and the light blue ballet shoes it did make me wonder a few things about the colour. I decided to get a second opinion on the matter and so I showed it to the student group.
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| New colour ways idea. |
I had one response from Paige who advised to make the colours more obvious as it seemed more white than defining colours. I had wondered about this and then I had an idea about the colours. I remembered that we could approach this however we choose and whilst I wanted authenticity in historical looks I decided to add some colourful input to the dress. I decided to do another piece using different colours and even darkened the white colours into a slight cool grey colour and adding a touch of white using the ink brush tool. This I felt kept some of the white fur to the cat I was studying. I decided to reverse the colours have the ballet dress in blue and the ballet shoes in white which seemed to be a good use of colour.
Looking back on the end result it seemed that the colours stood out more and were more obvious and defined. I liked the look of this piece and considered it for use in my final designs for the turnaround sheet.
I added this to the colour ways sheet for my production bible to show development and refinement, this I felt was a good element to include.
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| Colourways sheet 2 |
Looking back on the colour ways sheets I would think I had learned something from them and that is to not stick to the colours seen in historical images but to take my own perspective on the colour and presentation of my characters. I would think that seeking another opinion was a good idea as without it I wouldn't have considered the idea of better defining the colours and a better dress colour.
In hindsight I should've seen this element of colours sooner so that I could better look at alternate colours but in experience better ideas or refined methods come to mind later on. In conclusion I would think that I am satisfied with these colour ways sheets and even learned a few ideas I shall conduct another colour ways piece using the dress idea from my sketches as it would help develop more wardrobe at the same time.
In future I will try and experiment with reversing the present colours in the colour ways pieces such as the ballerina dresses. This should help me in developing my character turnarounds and the costume ideas for certain elements of the novel.
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