May 10, 2019

Character Design Challenge

I created this series as a part of Hayden Aube's 30 day Character Quest challenge. Each day of the challenge, participants were sent an email with a subject (e.g. "robot farmer" or "lizard-man") and some flavor text to help inspire unique interpretations. Over the course of the challenge I concentrated on developing characters with more complex expressions, poses, and and costumes to highlight their personalities and back stories.

The Bounty Hunter:

Daphne found the job a bit predictable after a while. Weekly shoot-outs with the Fingers gang. High-speed pursuits across the moons of Gleebox-Eight. She was over her life of bussing around the galaxy’s most wanted. Even rounding up escapees from Krukru penitentiary had lost its excitement. But accounting, Daphne thought. There was a life of adventure! The only thing she desires more than a career change is a good pot of coffee.

Optional Challenge: Who would've thought that the most revered bounty hunter of all time had no arms?

The Savage

Zunga looked at down at the results of his forage; three flootberries, two wugshrooms and a handful of cripula leaves. It was going to be much harder to convince Munmun of veganism than he thought. Let’s be real, a life without bacon isn’t worth living.

The Squire

14 year-old Kimble fell out of bed and dashed to get ready after hearing the call of the rooster. Groggy yet determined, he quickly donned his tights, tunic and ratty old boots before hustling out to meet Sir Alden. When he told Kimble that today’s lesson would be fighting a live ogre, Kimble thought the knight was kidding. He wasn’t. Kimble was caught unprepared.

Lizardman

Migmar was mid-laugh when instinct took over. Each muscle froze in place. A long tongue readied itself behind thin scaled lips. All it took for him to forget the joke Harbent just shared was a fly landing inches from those two bulbous eyes of his.

Optional Challenge: Use the provided random word generator. Include it in your character somehow. (my randomly generated word was "culture")

Gunslinger

Where's the rest of the Fingers gang when you need 'em? Well damn, Donovan's back at the club. And Worm got himself stuck in the Victorian era again. Oh shit, here comes that sumbitch Daphne trying to put you back in the slammer again. This time though... This time you won't miss your mark.

Optional Challenge: There's about to be a shoot-out! Make sure your gunslinger has their weapons drawn and is ready for a fight!

The Process

I created this series of characters using a mixture of traditional media and photoshop. Since this was a daily challenge I wanted to strike a balance between creating something I was happy with and finishing the prompt in less than two hours so I came up with a workflow that was fast but still allowed for some revision. I started with quick pencil sketches, sometimes going through two or three iterations before I was satisfied. Once I had the pencil sketch, I inked over it with a felt tip pen and scanned it to bring it into photoshop. Using my inked drawing as the key-line, I added color and some light shading. Since I was inking relativly quickly I often went into the drawings in photoshop to adjust a few little places where my lines weren't how I wanted them.

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