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.