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Woman of the Moon - Character

abimation
May 9, 2019
6 min read

CHARACTER DESIGN

As with the narrative the character design changed a lot during the development of the film. With both the characters narratives changing, the character design changed with them and adapted to be easy to replicate and interesting.

Above are my initial collection of designs that I liked or that generally inspire the way I am illustration just now. I'll go through a few of them so that you can understand how the characters began and how they adapted through out the design process.

In the very top right we have work by two illustrators I follow on instagram @triz_illustracion and @sophiemcpike. Like me they tend to be interested in unconventional representations of female bodies in media and tend towards more unusual character shapes.

Most of the items in the middle are copied over from my milanote board. Including the original colour selections for the film. As we know it became black and white but originally I had planned for the characters to each be slightly influenced by a different colour so that they always gave off different feelings and auras.

Then in the mix we have amethyst and Connie from Rebecca Sugar's Steven Universe. I have been watching a lot of that show but it is't the only one that influenced the character design.

We also have Kasey Golden a youtube illustrator who tends to draw with strong silhouettes and negative spacing. much like a few of the other artists on the board she likes a profile illustration too.

So that's as much talking about the board as I'm going to do. Let's get designing.

Creative character

I'll begin with the main character, as she has probably gone through the most development.

When I began this process I listed out for myself aspects of each characters personality so that I could design to emphasise those traits. With this character I decided on traits like; shy, mousey, creative, introverted, quiet, nervous, reserved and overthinker.

I pictured her in a very librarian type style to start off with and in some of the designs beneath she kind of reminds me of Maddie... Which wasnt deliberate but I see why it happened.

I gave her glasses to imply that she is visually focused and also an over thinker. I put her hair up to suggest that she is reserved, nervous and shy and I made her small to reflect her stiffling and lack of inspiration.

In a few more out there designs beneath I tried swapping the head shapes around to things more round, triangular or square and i felt the whole character became more confrontational and I didn't feel that was a good fit at all.

You can see that I was also initially experimenting with colours and black ad white.

When it came to moving forward with the designing, I took forward the strong side profiles and the bun or short hair. I kept the short and nervous but I lost a lot of the complicated aspects of her hair.

Her bun became lower for a little while because originally I though it fit better, even though it does make her silhouette less defined. I completed a lot of the animatics and storyboards with this version of the character before I think it became apparent that it works a lot better in a more static illustrated form. The hyperly designed hands, legs and heads were all to much to consider and the character went through some more designing.

I tried some styles that didnt come too narurally to me, such as lankier limbs in the style of adventure time or something closer to the time period I was trying to emulate like the jetsons. But ultimately I thought to myself "is this what you would do?' and the answer is no. So I tried drawing her more like myself and I really liked her. She can be seen on the bottom row on the left three into the right.

I boarded with this character for quite some time too before I decided that it annoyed me that I didnt know what to do with the other side of her head and realised that once again, she was a better illustration. Which is funny because the idea I went with in the end was from an illustration that I had made during inktober that translated a lot better than the others. she is on the top row, right hand side, third in.

Beneath is the first rendition of the character sheet.

Astronaut Character

Now almost the reverse happened with the astronaut in terms of development that the creative character. I feel as though I started pretty certain on what I wanted here but then ended up less sure as things went on.

With her character the traits I defined were: Strong, intelligent, ambitious, bold, analytical, helpful, outgoing, extraverted and driven.

With the initial character designs I was just able to draw and draw and draw as I had a far cleared idea of what I wanted to explore with her. For strong I really played up her thighs and the size of her lower half in comparison to her upper half to give a sense of stability and strength. I made her hair bouncy and full to show that she's bold, and outgoing and full of ideas. I tried to keep her to mostly big smiles as well.

But I did try out ideas that broke those rules as well. Such as long straight hair. Which I liked too but she looks a bit like Mable from Gravity falls. I tried some things in the bottom right as well where I honestly dont know what I was thinking there. She looks like a tree elf. I dunno. It's bold all right. I looked at real astronauts to draw the top right in black and white and that one actually ended up being one of my favourites and the one I began to work into after this.

Like I mentioned before this character was easier for me to design. I felt stronger about her sooner than the creative character and so I didnt do as much refined consideration.

I took what I liked about some of my favourite designs and I began pushing and pulling them around till I came up with something I wanted to go forward with. Initially the character had a large piece of protruding fringe and the rest of her hair hell down her back and into the shape of a rocket ship. She had big saucer shaped ears that took up half her head and very typical rubber pipe style eyes. Like the creative character she also had these very stylised legs that I later had to remove.

I also tried a thinner character here but hated it so much I swung the entire other way and loved her. But ultimately I chose to pick similar styling to the creative type so I could visually match them together onscreen.

Designing in movement

Needless to say there was challenges to making such bold designs move convincingly on screen. In fact it would have been far easier to pick more traditional characters for a film seeking to deal in complicated affairs but I dunno how to make life easy for myself.

I made a decision early on that I wasnt going to attempt to give the characters much front on angle. They were going to operate in binaries. It made for strong composition blah blah. So I began to look at other characters that did the same.

These two characters are cupcake and dino from the netflix show Cupcake and Dino. As you can see from their turn around Dino kind of just gets to a point and just flips over. I looked at this as consideration for how I thought these characters should move as well.

And while initially this put me at some ease I still ended up doing a lot of character changing as time went on. Certain things became difficult to replicate or annoying to draw from all the necessary angles on the final boards.

Not to mention that when the narrative was restructured I felt a need to update the characters to accompany it. After a while the proportions of these designs just seemed so off, particularly around the face.