My Digital Media Project - Brief 1 - So Far

Brief 1 is a mascot for a professional event. For this mascot, I've chosen to use a robot as a basis, going for a happy and endearing, yet still slightly melancholy, feeling for the character. The end result of the brief is to be a Character Sheet, a website banner featuring the character, and a basic vector image that could be reused wherever the character appeared.

Since the character is a robot, I oh so creatively nicknamed it Robo. First I began with a few sketches to determine what I wanted the character to look like, including shapes I wanted to use, and a spider diagram to help generate ideas. I sketched a few different possibilities, looking for a good silhouette. I eventually decided to have his arms and legs be more noodle-like, such as the limbs of classic black and white cartoon characters, such as Steamboat Willie.

[Apologies for the picture quality, but I don't have easy access to a working scanner, so I'm making do with my Macbook's built in camera.]

My first decision in regards to Robo was that I really wanted him to have a TV for a head, inspired in particular by a robot from a Japanese anime, FLCL. However, FLCL's style is less simplified than the style I had chosen, so I used a more stereotypical TV-like appearance for Robo's head.

I also wanted his shape would be very simplified, reminiscent of Katamari, an extremely fun, yet extremely odd, video game made by Namco. However, I wanted the character to be a simplified silhouette, rather than mimicking the colourful look of Katamari

After I had a clearer idea in my mind of what I wanted out of the character's basic appearance, I started building him in Adobe Illustrator.

I split him into different parts, on separate layers, to make it easier to edit his pose if I decided to do that at some point. Taking this possibility into account, I made a sheet of sketches for pose ideas.

Currently, the white sections on Robo are just white lines, but I plan to have them be see-through instead. However, I'm not entirely sure how to do that, and I might just do that in Photoshop, when I add him to the banner, by changing his layer to Multiply. As the white parts are just lines, I also added a coloured square in the background, so that I could see the white parts in more detail. Robo himself is nearing completion, there's only a few small details to add, and then I just need to add him to his banner, and the character sheet, and lastly, save a reusable Vector image of him.

My Digital Media Project - Oh boy

Greetings. I wondered if I would ever use this blog again, and it looks like the answer is yes. Are we going to act surprised that I haven't posted in a while?

Anyway, I've chosen to use this as a journal of my development, as I work towards my final Project, named Scheherazade: Living On a Tale. The project is named after a character from a fairytale, specifically, One Thousand and One Nights. The aim of the project is to build up more portfolio work, as well as a better understanding of the freelance illustration industry.

To achieve this, I'll be filling a selection of briefs, each aimed towards a different audience and purpose. The completion of these briefs will include a character sheet, and a prototype of the final product. These briefs are:

- A mascot for a professional event IE Pictoplasma

- The main character, a princess, from the fairytale Donkeyskin

- The main character of a comic, based around the Paladin archetype from gaming

- A merchant character for a video game aimed at children

- A mascot for a family friendly chain of Italian restaurants

EDIT 09/01/2015: The order of the briefs had to be rejigged slightly, due to some unexpected information, and the fact that I need more time to learn about the software the Merchant character would require. And the fact that I desperately want to have the Donkeyskin character finished before the development deadline.