Week 19; Feedback and Continuing Concepting

  This week we continued with our conceptual character development based on the feedback we got last week on Friday. My feedback entailed annotating my mood boards and further idea generation of my photobashes. We were also set a task to complete 20 iterations of value design (separation) for our characters so we can apply colour easily as an overlay.

Clothing Board

Annotated Mood Board

   So I started Monday with further pulling ideas from mood boards and clothing boards I had compiled, after annotating them and figuring out exactly what I wanted from them, then arranging them on my mannequin. Like last week I warped and used the perspective tool to clothe my mannequin until I had around 32 iterations of idea generation. I then put these images into greyscale mode so I could separate the values easier for the next stage.

Photobash Continued

Face Paintovers

  I then went on to some further idea refinement by doing paintovers from the four successful photobashes. I added accessories and such quickly by painting over the concept, which enriched the character and provided a purpose for the character. However before this I did research into what accessories a medieval fisherman would use and came up with a simple rod, a pronged harpoon and a basic net form, whilst adding detail to the belt area with various utilities that a fisherman may find useful. This added a layer of realism into my character which is quite valuable.

Accessory paintovers

  After this step I went onto separating the values, which actually was rather harder than it seemed. My initial plan was to just use an overlay layer with different value combinations until I found one that looked okay, but the layer blend mode didn't give the drastic change I was looking for, and ended up painting over some values by hand to get the correct definition. This in turn actually watered down the details I was wishing to keep so by the time it came to collecting different colour combinations the detail had almost gone and the concepts seemed rather watered down.

Value Separation

  However I proceeded in producing the colour iterations after picking a value separation that I liked. For this I collected a board of moods and colours from screenshots of Disney films and general happy mood images, which would be in keep with the project brief. I then colour picked the compositions and applied them over my concepts.

Colour Mood board

  They do seem rather radical but I figured that I'd make them radical to see what worked and then edit and mute the colours on a later pass of the concept stage.

Colour Design

  I then landed at my final concept, seen below:

  However, I was unhappy with the presentation level and detail of the concept so I went back in and added texture definition and surface definition, re-adding the folds I'd lost in the value separation stage. We arrive here, my final concept (middle), with hue/saturation tests either side of the final just to see if I wanted to tweak any final colours.

Final Concept - Refined

  That's pretty much where I wound up this week, I'll join you next week where I can finally start modelling!

Week 18; The Village Character Project.

  This week we were starting the long awaited Character project, and boy, does it feel good to be getting stuck in!

Initial scrapped concepts from last week

  So far this week I have been compiling mood boards, clothing boards and all manner of research! For our Visual Design lesson we were taught the practice of photobashing characters together. This involves making a “mannequin” of ourselves taken from our orthographical images we either had to provide for ourselves or were taken on Wednesday which I sadly missed. We then effectively cut and pasted items of clothing onto the mannequin, using the warp function and perspective function in photoshop to make the clothing sit on the model. This is an incredibly quick way of generating ideas and developing those ideas with paintovers and such.

Annotated Mood Board

  I started by taking reference from my mood board I created, only realizing that I needed to make a whole separate board with a much bigger size just for clothing to photobash together.

Clothing Board

Photobashed Iterations

Face Paint-Over and Photobashed Concepts

  I managed to produce around 24 iterations of my character in different pieces of medieval attire, around three of which I think worked quite well. I had to hand in the clothing boards, mood board and photobashes of my character in for feedback review and then work on from there, so I'll continue next week when I have all of my concepts approved and I'll work on paint overs and orhtographics. Until then!