Colorful Characters

Interesting character design is an area I feel I've made significant strides in recently and am excited to continue experimenting with. As an animation student I'm almost exclusively working somewhere between rough sketch to finished line work. I do enjoy rendering and experimenting with color. It's surprising what even a little extra detail can do to take a piece from a rudimentary phase to feeling complete. Unfortunately that little extra detail translates to a lot of extra work in the realm of animation. Once this semesters done I'm hoping to scan some of my sketch book characters in and dress them up real nice with digital paint.

My First Successful Animation Test

I did this way back in Tech 1. I feel like this is still one of the most interesting animations I've done at school. It's just a sack so there's no secondary details to screw up that might be holding it back that are present in some subsequent tests. I tend to avoid designing simple characters. Either my ego or some neuroses leads me think of it as cheating on some level. Really, I've done myself a disservice not spending more time in class working slowly into the more complex characters. I think I'll have to put together some more short tests over the summer with an emphasis on experimenting with simple forms.

This was also the first test where each pose was sketched out in my sketchbook along with twice as many unused poses before I ever touched the light table.