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Characters

Abigail Lamb
Dec 5, 2018
4 min read

There are 2 characters in this tale, a painter and an astronaut.

Initial sketches

When I came to design the characters I began by identifying some characteristics in each character that I wanted to distill into them.

For the painter they were:

Quiet
Nervous
Reserved
Creative
Soft
Small
Over thinker

While the Astronaut's were:

Ambitious
Driven
Helpful
Extraverted
Analytical
Bold
Confident

and then I sketched out the above three pages as tests for including these traits into the characters. From here I picked the designs I liked the best and began looking at influences to change and adapt my designs.

I've been following Kasey on instagram and youtube for a number of months now. I really like the way she mixes very defined shapes together to create her characters.

When I found her I remembered seeing a lot of similarity in our styles and because of that I'm always checking to see what she's doing.

She also has a very defined illustrative style so i hope by watching how she converts between digital and analogue work I can figure out how to convert my art from analogue to digital.

These are a few of her illustrations from Mermay that show off those mixed shape designs.

Obviously Rebecca Sugar. I implore you to find me an animator not influenced by Rebecca Sugar at the moment. She's so prevalent in the industry and her narratives and characters are groundbreaking.

Not only do I admire Sugar as a storyteller but I love her character designs. We know I love basing my designs on circles and soft organic shapes so obviously I love Sugars, Steven Universe characters. They're all soft and feminine but in a non objectified manor and I love that.

They're faces and movements are so expressive and the difference in character typing is impressive.

Here's amethyst cause she's great.

Triz has a great style, I've picked a black and white here but she also uses colour very interestingly when she does use it.

I love the textures and range of tones and line work in her black and white works though. It's similar to my own but different enough to be inspired by.

Her characters as well are short and character filled and share similarities with my own again.

I loved her inktober work so much as so she's been an influence prominent in my mind just now.

Sophie's illustrations of people always have thick thighs and that's something mine feature as well so I definitely like her work.

She was very helpful when I was trying to pin the intricacies of my style.

I love her line-less style which is something that I did in dissonance so It's something I still very much like.

Morghan's work has been a favourite of mine for months. She draws lots of women and that's something I also do.

I wish I could draw hands like she does and I'm always trying to learn how she's doing it, but I still hate hands... Gotta figure them out before this film.

But once again her curvy feminine style has been an influence in my character designs.

All these character designs have been at the back at of my mind as I've worked through the designs of the painter and the astronaut.

I havent had any of these influences especially in mind as I've made the characters but they've been there.

From here I've just been drawing and redrawing the characters till I felt as though I got them right. I'll begin with the development of the painter.

PAINTER

As you can see above my initial designs involved having her hair up or tied back in some way to show her reserved and controlled nature. Hair is a pretty common trope in female characters and is used to show their confidence or inhibitions. There's a very common trope of cutting hair short to show a change in mind set for female characters. So with all this in mind, this is why I chose to give her curly hair but that's tied up and constrained. I wanted her to be shorter and have a more withdrawn demeanour.

The character design went through some development and moving around like this. Initially she was curvier, bigger thighs and smaller waist, proper hands and big pouty lips, glasses too. Over time her curves got smaller, her feet and hands became smaller and lost detail. I removed her glasses because they were too difficult to draw consistently and I changed her hair a little too. A lot of elements were removed because they were hard to replicate tbh, this is also how the lips disappeared too. I feel happier with her design the longer it went on because she started far too complicated and became easier and easier to work with as time went on.

Eventually I realised that her hair was difficult to replicate time after time and I redesigned her once again.

astronaut

The astronaut had been clearer from the start. While initially I could come up with less designs than for the painter. But the ones that I did have combined to make a design that I stuck with from quite early on.

I always knew I wanted the painter to have wilder hair by comparison and be taller and more curvy than the painter. Initially her design felt a bit explorer girl but in reality it changed marginally from the beginning till now.