PCA Work Blog: Making the Unreal Real

In this post, we finally get to the creative aspect of this module. I had the three characters down in the same kind of brief that was given to the professionals in the last post. But first though, I had to lay a few ground rules.

The first was the general style. I tend to lean to the simple caricature look of anime, so realistic proportions were out for a start, and the eyes were a very important feature. I also work in the very minimalist style a lot of Illustrator users go for, so that was also a consideration that had to be taken into account. Some examples of this Illustrator style, not necessarily created in the program, and the general look I was going for follow.

As stated in a previous post, the reference library I built over the course of the project was very large, and even this is a limited cross-section of the many reference images I had.

Now, onto the actual design elements I finalised during the module. Since inspiration can strike at any time and can be hard to replicate, most of these images are taken from my drawing pad or doodled in my work book, as explained in a moment.

The first aspect I focused on was the eyes. It's widely know that the most expressive part of the body is the eyes, characters such as Manny from Ice Age can communicate physically with next to nothing but their eyes.

ALYSSA

FINAL DESIGN

NINA

Final design

JON

Final design

Hands were a problem for me. They're extremely complex things to get right, and my inexperience with proportions come up badly here. Here are some examples I've tried with creating hands entirely on my own with limited reference material

However, after developing throughout the module, working off of reference material and the like, I upgraded my ability to draw hands. Here is a later image as a 'before and after' comparison.