Portfolio Class- Character Development!

[Pixeltuner]

Heya,

I'm joining in as well. I hardly do cultural/historical costume things so this seems like a cool opportunity to learn and study :) Going for the Mongol Morgane. Trying very hard not to go too Amidala on this one since her head-dress was pretty much directly lifted from traditional Mongolian clothing.

[Pixeltuner]

Some details, rendering, colour and variations etc. on number 5. I'm sorry if I'm jumping ahead of you guys because of the line-art restriction on your part but I'm just having a bit of fun here.

[mateusrocha]

Thanks Tadas, for the comment about the face and looking at the mirror! :)

Actually, I want to thanks Dan aswell, for critiquing my Arthur even at this stage of the mentorship. It really meant a lot to me, because the anatomy was almost right to my eyes, but now that I tried the pose at the mirror... dude, my arthur was spending all his energy just to pose like that lol :)

I decided to skip Merlin (was thinking of a design for him since the beggining, but nothing worth doing showed up) to do the Morgane now. Also I'll try to improve the fat forearms and tiny hands, which REALLY is one of my most lasting problems, which it seems I never got to overcome.

So, thanks a lot Dan, and also Tadas :)

@KyTran: as I'm no good with anatomy, haha, my impression of your sketch is that she's holding the staff quite strangely. And I also agree with Zipfelzeus about the big mouth beasts thing.

@Pixelturner: hey, nice rendering there dude! :D I know its not finished, but just a reminder, as she's mongolian, people of that part of the world have very distinctive facial features. As for now, in your painting her face does not look like a mongolian girl :D nice work btw.

[Pixeltuner]

Hey thanks Matheus :) Yeah she might be a bit too 'generally Asian' at this point, but my Google search on Mongolians pretty much got their faces all over the place so I kind of went with the basic Asian at this point. Still subject to change of course ;)

[KyTran]

Zipfel: you are absolutely right, Thanks. I'm not sure why but drawing faces and has always been a big weakness of mine and environments come more naturally to me. You Thumbnails look really nice. Great variation in the silhouettes.

Mateus: Thanks, I'll try to hold something like that in a mirror to see what's wrong.

Pixel: I like what you've done with your Morgana, the headdress is a great element. Just one thing though, your pose and silhouette seems a little boxy to me and Dan had mention how if a design can fit pretty closely inside a box it can make it less dynamic.

Here are some thumbnails. I'm having a lot of trouble generating good ideas for tribal/ native american Morgana. need to do more thumbnails.

[malan]

So, my idea for Morgane will be inspired by Belly Dancers. I found about this video and really inspired me for some stuff, it's about something called Tribal Fusion Belly Dance, and it's a modern version of the traditional Belly dance, but, the thing that got my attention, was the different kind of costumes they wear, something darker maybe, compared to the colorful classic costumes you can find. So, if you wish, take a look at this video :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E2C242gl1w

And, here are some refs I have gathered today, just for visual ideas and key elements.


And, after watching a lot of videos of this, I had to do some gesture drawings from screenshots. The amount of movement on the body is something really important for this type of characters, so, I wanted to understand better about this. So, here they are. Some of them are very crappy, but the idea was to understand the motion :)



And, I got another idea for the final approach for this character, and I was thinking about taking some photos for reference to a friend that does this belly dance thing, but, Im not very sure yet.

And finally, Im still thinking how to make a character unique based on all of this ideas, how to make her magical, and not showing her just as a simple evil belly dancer.

So, what's your thoughts on all of this? :D

Cheers friends!

[Zipfelzeus]

@Pixeltuner: Woa nice designs and you're quick as hell :O

@thomasmahon:
Hey I wanted to give you this last time but your image was almost finished so i'd figure that it would'nt help much.
You should really check out hokusai. He did great illustrations and paintings of japanese culture.
For example for your geisha:
http://andreas.com/pixs/hok-3.jpg

If you consider maybe going a bit away from the geisha motiv there are also these picture of long haired women:
http://uploads8.wikipaintings.org/images...-uba-1.jpg
http://homepage2.nifty.com/tisiruinoe/Ho...ijinga.gif

And if you wanna get some inspiration from something really crazy look at this, it's picture of a woman's ghost that haunt people:
http://www.myartprints.com/kunst/katsush...488_hi.jpg

I hope that helps you a bit :)

[Pixeltuner]

@ Zipfelzeus: Don't worry about me being quick, that's years of practise :p

[JakeB]

Pixeltuner - Nice work so far, I'm doing Mongol too, and your smashing me lol.

Malan - Nice idea, if you can keep it from looking like just an evil belly dancer, like you said, that could be awesome. Looking forward to it :).

Did some studies, and some sketches, struggling though. I wanted to keep her kinda simple, to fit with the other characters, and make it looks like she could actually travel like the mongols did. As opposed to dressing her in the Amadala-esque stuff. Not sure that's the same time period as my culture either... Who knows.

But yeah, here's what I've got..





Edit: Yeah looks like that cool stuff with the badass headdresses and stuff comes from the 19th Century, and I'm in the 13th. Not gonna happen. Guess I'll leave that to Pixeltuner ;)

[Pixeltuner]

Hey Jakeb,

oh dear. COMPETITION! :) Well you have the facial features down better than I have, because you actually studied them lol. But yeah I'm going the ceremonial dresses route and not the nomadic thing so we'll probably end up with way different results anyway which will be cool to see ^_^

[KyTran]

Jake: I like you practical approach, you can probably decorate her a little more than the average traveling mongol though because I think Dan mention that she was Arthur's sister so that makes her royalty. Great studies by the way ^^

[Thomas Mahon]

Really awesome stuff guys. Especially your belly dancers Malan, look awesome. I'm really struggling with mine, I'm not used to thinking in line, more about big forms and stuff, thats the challenge I guess. I'm pretty much settled on the fan idea, mainly because it's a flip on the merlin characters smoke. I'm planning on making the fan out of stretched skin, like a bats wing, and it'll also be magical/glowing, and be a lightsource in the image. I'll do some more research into mythologies and things to maybe inspire something more. Thanks for your help Zipfelzeus

[Zipfelzeus]

@KyTran: I hope my crit didn't sound to harsh. It's great that you face challenge!

Day 2:
6 out 9

[Pixeltuner]

You're doing great Thomas, you can still think about following the form in line with patterns and folds or even with lineweight. It's just a different way of thinking to achieve the same. It might be an idea to draw a little mannequin underneath with the pose you're going for in light lines (that's what I did for mine and then just copied it a couple of times and drew the clothes on top of it :p) so you have a good base to work off and don't have to guess a lot :)

[malan]

@Pixel Nice man, as everyone has already said, you got those ideas quite fast! good work dude! I like the color pallete you chose! :)

@Jake Thanks man! Im still trying to get the idea haha, hope I get it soon :) and your sketches and ideas for a more traditional looking character are interesting! keep it up!

@Thomas Thanks a lot man! :) and your lines are looking good! maybe you could try to get shapes with scribbles first, and then start detailing (maybe something similar to Zipfelzeus). Also using that idea Pixel told you. There are different ways to work with lines. You can do it man :)

@Zipfelzeus As the last time with your Merlin sketches, these are looking very interesting, very unique personalities on them! Good work! :)

[Cj_marsh]

Been a follower of this just havent joined up probably to late for me to join in, may pop in if I have some time.

Malan- I stumbled across the idea you may like to use is the belly dancers who use fire, to help with design use a simple google image search for fire belly dancer and you will see some crazy stuff. Particularly this image caught my eye and thought I would leave it here and let your mind run wild with it, hope it helps! :D

[Thomas Mahon]

So I feel like i've commited too early to a character without exploring more options, probably because I'm worried about messing up with lines. After talking with Dan abit and doing a little more research, I found that Morgan Le Fay was a sorceress and in Japan, witchcraft was generally about summoning a familiar, either a snake or fox. Did a little study of sub-surface scattering for the fan.

[JakeB]

That study looks awesome Thomas. One thing, the design looks cool, but where the snake hits her waist ATM, it looks a bit like a paw or something. Like the snake looks like an arm, with the spikes on her waist being the claws. Just a heads up. Looks good overall though, your lines are coming along great. The way the cloak ends all ragged at the floor is cool as well.

Keep it up man.

[DavidFisher]

So my crit was about my silhouettes, so thats what im working on. not to good with doing them, but its what i want to pay attention to this round for morgane, and not making it so rectangular and weak. im seeing a lot of positive changes to everyones work, keep it up!

[Pixeltuner]

Took a step back and took another spin on the design, and made her actually look mongolian facewise :p