The Undiscovered Country

For the Projections module, I went into almost completely unexplored territory for me: the art of character design.


Of course, this is a huge subject to delve into, and I'd need several more months, without any other modules taking up my attention, on top of what I've done for this module to produce a fully realised character of proper, professional standard. As I learned this the hard way throughout the module, I narrowed my focus and concentrated on the core concepts of character design: to communicate effectively the essence of a character through their appearance.

As said above, the very idea of going from next to nothing to full body designs of any quality just through this module was a ludicrous goal, not only from an inexperience point of view but from a development point of view also. At this stage of development, you're still examining how designs work and attempting to replicate them, only much later once the concepts are fully grasped do you strike out on your own and put that foundational knowledge into creating full original designs. Thus, at this stage designs are pretty derivative, attempting to simply backwards engineer images to figure out how they work rather than simply putting pencil to paper and conjuring designs out of thin air.

I would compare it to editing software in a way, at first you slowly learn your way around the interface, doing basic tasks to familiarise yourself with the program bit by bit, mastering this function here, figuring out what that function does there, until you're confident enough with using the program that you're able to use its tools to make your own workarounds that it wasn't designed to do (e.g. Windows Movie Maker, back when I used it, had only one length of audio fade available. If you wanted a longer or shorter fade, you were out of luck. As I got to be more and more adept at the program, I figured out a workaround to get audio fades of any length: crossfades between audio files can be whatever length you want, so if the audio being crossfaded to is silence, it'll function as a fade, thus giving you a custom length fade). Designing characters, for me during this module at least, is a similar experience. At first, you study images you think work to try and find what works about them, attempt to replicate it, of course making mistakes in copying it, and when your imperfect copy isn't working like the original is, you study the differences to figure out what differences have 'broken' the image. Very subtle differences, a line slightly shorter here or a slightly different angle there, can make a startling difference in effectiveness.

This is exacerbated by the very minimalist art style I am developing both in other modules such as Practices and outside of college. Since you're creating complex images with simple shapes, even more so than ever the slightest imperfection (or, as I'll discuss later, perfection) can completely shatter the illusion that you're looking at anything other than a collection of shapes.

However, I'm getting ahead of myself. In order to do the above, I needed images to study. Thus, through browsing the internet, by the end of the module I had a folder crammed with material.

Just some of...

...the many images...

...I collected as reference material

Although these works would be collected steadily over the course of the module, it was time to find something to work towards. As it turned out, I had subjects to design sat right in front of me. More on that next post.