Week 4- Nano Pirates!

This week is the start of my second project Nano Pirates. I picked this project as its one I can have the most fun with. This project is very much about trying out and developing my own style for character design.

As always I started the project by going through the brief and setting up the goals for myself. My main goal is to render all of my characters to a polished state so I can have a final character line-up. I'd also like one or two promo images to put them into context. Since I did not get to bring my characters to a polished state in my last project due to time constraints I'm going to try and condense my design process down for this project to be able to meet that goal. So by the end of this project I'd have 12 consistent images in a style that I enjoy working in. It's also a test for me to figure out if i want to work on this style further for my FMP.

To begin this project I had a clear idea of the type of style I wanted to aim towards. Inspired mainly by the artist Alexandre Diboine and Double fine's Broken Age, I want a simplified and textured look to my characters, with exaggerated silhouettes for all of them. I selected a few key images to work as my main style guide. With my last project I became lost in the all my moodboard images, so I wanted to refine this fairly on.

I also made a time plan so I could figure out what needed to be changed in my design process to acheive my goals. In the end I decided to cut my iteration process down with the aim of having all my designs ready to render by the end of the first week.

Before I began concepting my characters I made some quick notes about any potential household objects my characters could wear/ wield. I decided to have all my characters fit a certain theme. For example having a chef character comprised of items you can only find in a kitchen, to make it clear who this character is and what job they have in the crew.

Quick household objects moodboard

It was also suggested to me to look up the official jobs on a pirate ship (http://www.thepirateking.com/historical/ship_roles.htm) which helped with figuring out the roles of my 12 characters. With this I listed all the jobs, with a description of the type of character I'd like to fill that role. This gave me a image in my mind to work off of for my characters.

With rough descriptions in place I began thumbnailing in my sketchbook. I then took aspects of my favourite thumbnails and cleaned them up. Because I want to render out as many of my characters as possible I skipped straight to colour when refining these characters. At the end of the week I've almost finished my initial line-up of characters, I'm two characters behind at this moment But I'm really enjoying how these look so far.

By the end of next week I'd like to be finished with the character sheets, ready for some promotional images for the week following