Animated Narratives - Week 9 - Character Silhouette

For Week 9, I continued developing my idea from the interactive treatment and mind map that I did in Week 8 and 7, respectively. I created several silhouettes for the main character in the game and some final silhouettes for the creatures that are found in the jungle during our main character’s journey. For the creatures in the jungle, I tried to go with spiders, wolves, beetle, bats, and a creature hawk-like creature with animal legs. For the main character, I tried to come up with different designs based on Celtic Mythology. I tried to copy their hairstyles and dress as best as I could. I also added horns in some of the concepts to see how it might look in general.

This week’s work examines the idea of Silhouettes. Silhouettes are the first step design into creating characters. It is the fastest way to come up with new ideas and new designs for characters you are working on. By using the silhouette for designing the character for my game, I was able to see what shape best suits the character that I was looking at, what are the main characteristics of my character, and what makes the character look more unique and memorable. I can even use these silhouettes to compare between each other and merge the parts that I like from each silhouette. For example, if I like the head of one silhouette and the body of another, I can merge them to create a different silhouette. This way I save time by not focusing on the detail and just worrying about the main characteristics and shape of the character.

For creating these silhouettes, I looked at a lot of reference for how I could set up my character. I also looked at some tutorials on YouTube to understand and learn the basics of creating silhouettes. I have linked the YouTube references below. I also took some inspirations from a visual library of character design silhouettes from a site called Character Design References (https://characterdesignreferences.com/visual-library-2/character-design-silhouette). They had an amazing library of character silhouettes, which helped me decide which way do I want to go with my silhouettes.

YouTube References:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_3262suU2g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI62rHNtg2w

By examining the works from the Character Design References site, I was able to improve how my silhouettes looked. When I started sketching out the silhouettes for my characters, I had little idea about how I should go about it. I was just grinding my way through trying to come up with something nice. But after watching the tutorials on YouTube and silhouettes from character artists, I decided to change the way I was working and the setting I was working on. This made it easier for me to come up with better and cleaner silhouettes.

Downloads:

Download File: week-9-reference.zip