30 Day Character Design Challenge - Day 1

1. Put your iTunes library, favorite Spotify playlist, etc. on shuffle and design a character inspired by the first song that comes up.

So this is day 1 of this character design challenge. I went on Spotify, picked the first playlist I saw. I couldn’t be bothered to try and find a playlist I’d never heard and didn’t think I’d hate.

It was the musicals playlist. And the first song I got was Ten Minutes Ago from Roger and Hammerstein’s Cinderella.

I thought designing a version of Cinderella would be way too obvious so you get... An unusually young Fairy Godmother, with a bit of a pumpkin theme.

Also, fun trick, due to how I shaded her, if I turn off the visibility on her flat colours, she instantly turns into a ghost.

Finally, please ignore the perspective on the window. Why did I decide to use a background that requires drawing architecture again?

30 Day Character Design Challenge - Intro

So I'm going to give a try to this 30 day challenge. Basically, every day has a different prompt and you have to draw something to that prompt. I'm gonna start today, and try to do one a day.

Wish me luck.

My Digital Media Project - Brief 3 Prototype

I detailed pretty much the whole process of making the page in a previous post, so instead, I'm just going to detail what I changed while finishing it.

Instead of having two layers of tone to shade the jewel on the shield, I decided to just have it and the main body of the shield be slightly different shades. However, that experiment told me that layering tones was a functional plan, so I used it on the backgrounds of the second and final panel. On the final panel, I also added action lines, to increase the impact of the... Well, impact. Finally, I changed the clang sound effect's colours so that it popped a little more.

Now, on to the character sheets...

My Digital Media Project - Brief 2 Prototype

Brief 2 was the illustration for Donkeyskin, which I posted briefly about before.

Firstly, starting with the scanned image, I did the obvious first step. Flat colours. After that, I added textures to the walls and pillars, to make them look more like stone or marble.

With those parts done, I considered what I wanted to do for the shading. I decided to shade all in shades of brown, to help keep the colours warm, which I hoped would make the dress stand out more, as it's a cooler colour than the rest of the room. To shade I created a layer on top of the colours, but below the lineart, and used the shades of brown to create shadows and highlights where I wanted the light to be shining.

After that, I decreased the opacity...

Which made it look like this:

Then I added the words, a small section of the story of Donkeyskin, that describes what is going on in the illustration.

And finally, I layered two old paper textures on top of the whole piece. However, in doing this, I was bothered by how much the dress didn't pop, underneath all the layers of brown I'd put. I wanted the dress to have the appearance that I was almost glowing. So, I went onto one of the paper texture layers, and erased the texture that covered the gown. I felt that that made the dress pop in a more pleasing way. You can see where I erased if you look closely at the layers.

My Digital Media Project - Brief 1 Prototype

The prototype for the first brief was a banner for a website, in this case, I looked up the dimensions for a Twitter banner (So that I can use it for my Twitter, because I'm a filthy cheater).

I had a very particular idea of what I wanted this image to look. Joyfully, I soon discovered...

This would be the easiest thing in the world to do. Seriously, it took me all of a half hour. Granted, I already had the character (Robo) drawn in Illustrator, and that definitely took longer, but it was also long done, before even the development deadline.

I just selected a square, and used the gradient tool to create the fade effect I wanted. Then it was only a matter of adding the desired words on top. I'm fairly sure I spent more time picking a font than putting in the lines.

Seriously, less than half an hour.

My Digital Media Project - Game Plan

Okay, so I've finished all of the prototypes for my briefs.

I have to post about how I did them.

I'm gonna do that in order of brief number.

Okay? Okay.