Exercise: Character development

This exercise very much intimidated me when I read the instructions and was was asked to come up with two different characters of my own! First I collected as many examples of characters as I could and categorised them into different types – there are so many it would be an endless task… I ended up with the following set here in my Pinterest account:

Professions
Babies
Robots
Manga/Japanese/Asian
Political Cartoons
Sketches and ideas
Superheroes
Film characters
Classic cartoon characters
Characatures
Politicians
Book illustration characters
Disney/dreamworks

Then I had to decide on a character to create so I brainstormed some ideas: from professions to people I know, famous people to dancers or styles of people I settled on a ‘Strictly Come Dancing’-esque male dancer and a female waitress which is close to my heart since I was a waitress for many years while studying.

For my male dancer, I was stuck between salsa and paso doble, trying for a kind of cocky show-off look emulated in one of the salsa dancers I know when my friends and I go dancing and who wears an open shirt down to his belly button, a head band and has long hair. Fantastic! To help with some ideas and shapes and styles I created another section in my Pinterest board with some male heads with smug features and some dancers.

And then started sketching ideas.

After trying different styles and body shapes, I decided that I would go for a tall, lean, toned look with a little bit of latin stereotype and a bit of a Zorro masque. I also tried some colours and added a little curl to the ends of some of the shapes to give a bit extra flair.

I then refined the drawing and kept drawing it to get used to it as per the below examples.

For Christmas I got a lovely set of professional alcohol markers which were perfect for the kind of comic style character style I wanted to bring to the colouring process.

I then went for an almost comic style colour effect to my character, drawing it from the front, back and side as required.

For the next character, my female waitress, I decided to try to do something very different in style, more textured and drawn and more like a lot of the nice cute and small characters from kids’ books. I did another spider mapping of ideas, picking my most favourite aspects of all the similar characters I had collected in my Pinterest board.

I also made a small inspiration section in my Pinterest called Waitress Inspiration with my favourite styles of characters and some waitress and chef illustrations I had found.

I then just started sketching ideas, trying out different styles, hair, eyes, body shapes etc.

I decided to go for a simple triangular shape of a dress, with an exaggerated head and hair size and simplistic features, feet and hands and tried out different media as I also wanted to have more texture.

I finally got to the below combination of my favourite elements and features, preferring a base of water colour and then using pencil to give grain and then ink for fine detail and more texture.

Final reflections:

I really enjoyed the challenge of this exercise. When I did any art at school, a lot of it was just drawing from still life or photos etc. and we had only some design elements so having to come up with something entirely mine meant that I had to let my sketching hand loose and try out shapes and think of warping reality to create or emphasise body shapes and fun features that were cartoon-like. At times I became quite frustrated and had to go away and come back again as I wasn’t quite liking the things I was coming up with but then when I kept going and trying to refine elements and pick parts of previous sketches and ideas I liked, I was able to come up with something I wanted to use! I then got into the rhythm of that for the second character so it felt like I had come up with a good process for myself though I definitely needed some space and distance to then come back and reassess.