To the Underworld

So this week marked the start of the Dichotomous Character project. Now whilst I absolutely adore designing characters, I'm not so keen on doing it as part of the course as I have a tendency to over think them, and put lots more pressure on myself to create perfect concepts than is needed. It's mostly because I'm afraid of getting basic things wrong and not being confident enough in my understanding of anatomy, proportion, pose or how clothes hang on the body that I get very slow with the concepting phase. Multiple times during this week I've had to catch myself and go 'this is done for now, stop getting so involved in your own head.'

For example I'll spend hours trawling through the internet (and awkwardly posing in front of my mirror) to find the perfect pose. Or I'll spend hours pinning cool headdresses in the hopes of finding the best reference. But eventually I had call it quits, and tell myself that at the end of the day, what I need is enough to get started on 3D next week.

One of the good things about this year is there is less of an emphasis on quantity for quantities sake. So if I find the right design after my fourth iteration I'll stop there, rather than trying to generate 20 designs for the sake of ticking a box. I'll admit I know I could have been more creative, iterated more and done more experimentation this week with the designs, but I also have to know myself, and know when to reign my perfectionist nature in and say 'it's good enough.' Otherwise all I end up doing is creating more stress for the next few stages of the project. We only have four weeks, and I'd rather have a more basic design that's executed beautifully, than have a wicked concept with a subpar outcome.

So that being said this week hasn't been too bad in regards to getting things done. As always I set myself tasks at the beginning of the week to be on target for the next one, and so far I've mostly finished them all.

It was a bit of a slow start since most of monday was spent handing in the Sentry gun project and coming up with ideas to concept, however things picked up pace once I'd chosen my idea and sorted out a pose to concept on top of.

So onto my idea. Initially I had three vague ideas for this project which were ;

Sun and moon: I was thinking of doing two characters that represented the sun and the moon, big surprise. The moon one would perhaps be wearing a wolf pelt, have power over water and be inspired by eskimo's/water/ice based climates, and the sun one would be more inspired by african tribes with power over water.

Two kings of the forest: The second idea was inspired by characters from one of my favourite books 'the cry of the icemark' essentially they are two kings that rule the forest at different times of the year. So one rules over autumn and winter, the other over spring and summer.

Finally the idea i've chosen to move forwards with is two characters inspired by the greek god and goddesse Hades and Persephone. I chose this idea mostly because it had the strongest, and in my opinion, most original take on duality/dichotomy, and I felt the most connected to it as I'd already started thinking about a personal project based off a king and queen of some supernatural/otherworldly setting.

Essentially Persephone is a young innocent girl who was raised sheltered from the world, but was also raised quite priveleged and as a result is quite entitled and assertive. She also tends more towards being an extrovert due to a longing for the freedom and human interaction she was denied whilst being brought up.

In a lot of greek myths Persephone, despite being the goddess of- actually becomes more feared than Hades, so I wanted to play on that, and have her as this naive yet powerful young woman. She's neutral at first, but the longer she rules the Underworld the more she tends towards evil.

However I want to give the project some more originality, so I decided to make Hades and Persephone oriental. By this is I mean their designs are inspired by asian culture, which I kept deliberately unspecified as I wanted more creative freedom with them. I also thought it would tie in nicely to the overall concept for Persephone as countries like Japan, Korea and China like to portray young women as the epitomy of innocence and fresh-faced beauty. Geisha and Gisaeng have had a particular influence on my project, especially because they focus on beauty and being 'a work of art' rather than a woman with a will of her own, which is how I wanted Perspehone to appear at first glance (as it was her beauty Hades fell for, not her nature). Hades by contrast is more inspired by samurai, because of his sense of duty and more closed off nature. I felt that armour would be a nice metaphor for the outer shell he presents the world, and also makes him appear colder and less human.

Anyway onto what I actually did this week.

The first thing I did was fill out these character creation matrixes to get a better idea of who my characters were and why I was creating them:

I then made these mood-boards for them:

As always I add to my mood-boards throughout the project, but to save confusion these are the final ones.

I also did a fair bit of research into kimono's and Asian clothing in preparation for making Persephone in 3D.

Like so:

I chose her to make as I felt that she was challenging enough to stretch me, but not too intimidating as a first attempt at a realistic character. Hades with his more complex outfit and aged face presented technical difficulties that I didn't feel equipped enough to cope with just yet. I decided early on with Persephone's character design that I would make her simple enough to model well, but bring more complexity to her design with texturing and a more intricate headpiece to keep the attention on the face, and illustrate her importance as a character.

I also researched flowers and their meanings whilst concepting her head-dress, as I wanted everything on her character to have a reason to be there, so as to avoid feature creep. Her patterns on her sash and sugar skull also have meaning. The pattern on her sash is actually a visual representation of the myth behind her captivity in the underworld, and the symbol on the skull is the chinese symbol for 'underworld.' The other patterns on her design were created by studying existing oriental patterns, as well as being inspired by intricate henna designs.

Here are some patterns I designed:

I chose sugar skulls as my inspiration for her skull because I love how something traditionally morbid is made into something beautiful through use of colour and pattern. I wanted to give her a skull to remind people she is the queen of the underworld, but to soften it with flowers and patterns to remind people that she is also still the goddess of spring.

Having flower imagery on her design was important to me not only because of their symbolic meaning as flowers, but also because they represent her role as the goddess of spring, and are a good visual metaphor for how the underworld is affecting her. For example the pattern on her kimono shows cherry blossom blooming at the top, but towards the bottom the flowers have died, and petals are starting to fall. Showing how the underworld is stripping her off her power to bring life to nature.

I started out with a few very quick thumbs to loosen up:

I then went onto to do four costume iterations, I then combined my favourite parts of those designs into a final(ish) design. This changed quite a bit when I made the orthographics, and I'm sure it will change further once I start making it in 3D, but it's a good starting point for now.

I then did some photobash/painted pattern iterations to get an idea for the kind of patterns her costume would have. This is was particularly important as I'm making the clothing relatively simple in shape, with no added props, but bringing complexity in by adding lots of detail to the clothing.

I also did some head-dress iterations. Initially I did my face and head-dress designs on paper, mostly because I missed sketching, but also because I found it easier to get my head into the work that way:

I then did some quick combined iterations in Photoshop, by combined I mean I picked out my favourite parts of the pencil sketches and mushed them together, added, took away etc.

Here they are all together:

And here's a close up of the patterned designs at the bottom:

Next I did some face iterations. This is my absolute favourite part of the design process as faces are my comfort zone. I was also focusing on designing her make-up whilst I did this. I wanted to make this serve a purpose too, which Is why I opted for the make-up that shaded out the top of her face slightly, to represent the darkness of the underworld starting to consume her. I chose to keep her face and head-dress designs separate, because I didn't want people to be biased when choosing a favourite, for example if they love the head-dress they may pick that one even if the face isn't that strong.

Here are the faces:

I decided to go for the rounder faces as they gave a more innocent feel to the character, as round shapes are often associated with friendly good characters. However I want her to still be interesting and just a little more intimidating in appearance as she is a queen, so I exaggerated some features slightly such as her eyes and lips, and used make-up to make her design more striking and less soft in places, such as the cheeks.

And here is the final face design I ended up with:

The pattens on her face may change when I texture.

Once I had a relatively clear idea of her design I made some orthographics:

On reflection I feel like I could have been a lot more creative with her costume design, although I did what I could in the time given to me, and whilst her design is by no means as good as it could be, I'm still quite pleased with how it's turned out, especially as I find characters particularly challenging to concept.

This week we were also lucky enough to have a talk by character artist Blaire Armitage who suggested a lot of good sites to follow/go on, and gave some sound advice on sectioning your goals into short and long term, so as to not be discouraged by not achieving unrealistic targets.

We covered portfolio's in Critical Studies. I'll admit it's something that intimidates me considerably, as I still don't have a clue as to what I want to do by the end of this course, or feel like I have enough work to put into one. Its so difficult to find time to work on personal projects, when I'm spending so much time trying to keep my head above water on the course ones.

However the advice will still be relevant when it comes to making my own, so I'll note the main points down here:

So now it's time for an Action Plan:

Get to the same point with Hades concepts

Make my low poly model for Persephone, and her high poly sculpt

Do my colour concepts

It doesn't look like much but I'm anticipating the character model will take a long time to make.

Lets hope I get this all done, or week 2 is going to be very stressful indeed.