CHARACTER DESIGN
- Abigail Lamb
- Dec 7, 2016
- 3 min read
Lute
Let's talk characters then! I feel like I've done myself good here, only having one character to contend with. For a while as you know I thought about having a computer for Lute to interact with and I'm so glad I didn't decide to go forward with that. Lute here is round a tubby and soft and really likable as a character, I hope.
His design came around almost entirely by accident as well. I was looking at a lot of real astronauts and other people's interperatations of astronauts for a long time. I still am even though I am 100% not changing Lute. To begin with I was looking at elements of real astronauts and picking elements I wanted to include and those I wanted to ignore. I spent a long time redrawing his head as well. Even at the beginning I knew I never wanted anyone to see Lute's face. It wasn't important and it allowed me to put the solution to Lute's problem's quite literally right in front of him and by extention the audience. It may seem this whole time that his visor is concealing something but in reality it's providing something.
The gallery above provides some images of Lute's development. Like I mentioned above I was selecting small elements to capitalise on during earl development. In the first image I picked shoes and shoulderpads. I like to think that my obsession with the 80's filted in there because I can't justify that in any other way. I didn't like it at all, it looked really weird and blocky and I just felt nothing for the character.
The next one I tried I tried because in much earlier observational sketches I was having a lot of trouble with the legs. I address my problems head on. I always do the thing I've been avoiding because the parts you avoid doing are the bits that will help you the most to do. I knew that legs were clearly a weak design point for me so I decided to try turning that into a strength. I looked at real pictures of astronauts again and decided they had rather puffy trousers. So Lute got fuffy trousers. While I really liked the fuffy trousers the rest of the design just wasn't quite there yet. To begin with I liked the fact that it was feminine and i was pretty pleased with the design. I thought maybe the issue was in how the helmet was connected to the rest of Lute, so from design to design I changed those things around a bit. I sketched different heads out on paper and I changed them up in digital illustrations too. I changed the colours us and flopped between modern spaceman to vintage spaceman to see which aspects I liked better.
In the end I decided I was sick of people asking questions about Lute being a girl and decided to make his hips and thighs less feminine. Not that I thought there was anything wrong with that but I really just wanted him to be soft and that's what I wanted people to say, not "feminine" so changes were made. I made the curve on the puffs lower down, so the weight was now bunching around the ankles. It was a far more androgenous look and for a while I was happy.
But the final design came from a far more humble origin. At the beginning of october I took on the inktober drawing challenge, as a way to familiarise myself with my film concept and maybe with Lute. I aimed to draw a piece of film concept art every day so I would end up with a bank of references to help me out later on. Plus it's some good promotion for the film. But because they were to be made one a day I simplified Lute to an astronaut comprised of mostly bean shapes. Beans are rounded curves and soft and now that I see Lute as being made from them I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner. But nonetheless the Lute we know today was born through my own laziness. Now that I think about it, it makes a whole lot of sense. Anyway I completed all 30 days using that Lute and by the end, not only was I accustomed to the design but other people were too. I was getting a compliment about him daily for around the last two weeks. People were dropping my purpose messages to tell me they loved him. This design had build a small cult following. He was perfect.
Below are just a few samples of the sketches from the inktober challenge. The rest can be found in my sketchbooks.
