Raph's Sketchverse

[Raphael_Nadeau]

last week,

[Raphael_Nadeau]

last week,

[AfricanVoodoo]

Hi! I love the characters that you are making! So cartoony and stylized yet I can still see you are learning so much from your figure studies. Nice!

I do have a question though. What is your process of creating your characters (and how you paint them digitally, please) and do you have any tips for character designing? Thank you!

Keep it up bro!

[Raphael_Nadeau]

@AfricanVoodoo, thanks a lot man! Nothing special about my process I think, but I can try to explain what I do. I guess there are 2 process, designing the character and drawing/painting her/him. I found the best way for me to start a character is to find what's up with her/him and go from there to think of some kind of back story (really vague nothing detailed at all just some general idea). Let's take the blonde girl from last week for example; at the begging I only had the word ''beach warrior'' so I started to think about seashore, beaches and what we can find there. From there I start to sketch ideas and everything I think could be cool, after that I search refs on google, looking for beaches/tropical tribes that could help my sketches have a better design. After I refined the design from the research, the idea about the character is still the same but the design is stronger (hopefully) from I learned from the world. 

then start the 2nd process, painting the final image, for this style, I do line art - shadow mapping - crosshatch the shadows - add flat color(I try to add some little color variation from the flats) - and flat shadow color (light blue on multiply) and I think that's it. if you want more explication on that I can show you more.

So basically  1-idea 2-sketches 3-research 4-refine design/sketch 5-lineart 6-color



Here are some early ideas for the population and where they would live and their town. The town would be based on a sea turtle, they could have been visited by a giant turtle or worship a sea turtle god or some thing like that. Maybe they have a sea turtle armor/weapon from a legendary warrior. From there I could think about how the town is set up for defense or tides and things that happens near this type of area.



Early sketches, she was suppose to have a sword and a shield but that made no sense to carry this in her environment.
The idea for her would be that she's not from this town, she could come from a pirate ship or something like that, so she could have some issues with some people from the town and there's lots of avenue for story there I think.



It's not there but I changed the sword for a small knife that she could carry everywhere when she's swimming.
I worked on her proportion too.



I tried to make her skirt to look like a jelly fish, added some shells her knife is on her left leg (easy to access). 
All that said, I will probably go back and work on her design and on the render style since I think it is not that efficient. 

So yeh if you have more question, don't be shy.

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[Raphael_Nadeau]

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