Week 9- Picking a Pair

Continuing from my character line up from last week I picked two "final" designs. This was a difficult process as I liked nearly all of my line-up characters, each for different reasons. With my Ice character I went with my gut feeling and just picked my favourite. Fire was a lot more tricky for me as those characters showed the most variation and personality. In the end I asked others what they thought of my characters and let that help me with my decision. From here I had a good base to develop my characters further.

Left- Ice, Right- Fire

I produced a few value iterations trying to develop  my characters clothing and overall look. I wanted to give Ice an angular and jagged look all around so I focused on sharp, geometric shapes and patterns to decorate her dress. Again Fire proved to be a problem for me as I could not get a definite look down for her dress. After asking for feedback I combined elements from the iterations that worked, and discarding those that didn't.

After that I began my orthographic drawings for my Ice character, during this time I found that I no longer liked how this character looked, so I changes a few things and iterated further. The main changes being:

Hair- I switched out the big hair to a neat short cut, to further contrast my Fire character.

Proportions- I elongated Ice's proportions to make her significantly taller than Fire as opposed to being the same height.

Accessories- I found that my original design did not give out a sense of cold, so I added some fur garments to Ice. I also played around with the idea of giving her a real fox scarf, to further emphasise her cruel personality (to contrast Fire's warmer personality.)

Further Iteration  

Final orthographic

At this point I was putting off the orthographic drawing of my fire character as I felt that she was no longer as strong of a character as Ice was. Fortunately I got some good advice from my tutor Heather, who showed me the designs Sandra Backland whose designs beautifully knitted outfits. Something that stood out to me the most were the bulky, slitted sleeves of these garments. looking at this knit work reminded me of the shapes that lava makes when it flows, linking it back to my character nicely. 

I also briefly looked at chiffon cloth whilst iterating my Fire character and in the end came up with a final orthographic that I'm going to take to 3D in the coming week. 

iterations 

Fire Orthographic

To close here is my picture of the week:

As I've been feeling super rushed in my past few life drawing sessions, and also with this  character project, I decided to take the time to just do some one hour studies of the figure, to wind down a bit.

Reference list:    

Sandra Backlund 1, viewed 30 November 2014, <http://www.creativeboysclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/0230.jpg>

Sandra Backlund 2, viewed 30 November 2014  <http://sandrabacklund.com/>.

Lava Flow, viewed 30 November 2014

<http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/93/cd/68/93cd68301fd4a4e1082698abd45513b6.jpg>