This week I've been redoing my concept art for the Dichotomous Duo project. It's been interesting, to say the least. I've made a fairly interesting duo of characters and managed to start off modelling already, which is great. The biggest fear I had in this project was going to be my time, and at the moment I believe I'm mostly on track.
This is what I've started with, a whole bunch of Silhouettes. It was a far more powerful start for a project than before there is no denying that.
After a very rough starting place I started to note down some ideas. Now we as a year were told to use less words and focus more on the art. Totally smart idea personally and for some reason it's not completely intuitive. The biggest thing was focusing on drawing ideas and not writing them.
Taking the silhouettes further gave me alot of room to play around. I wasn't sure what sort of world or setting I would explore, or style. I had no idea but just focused on making a duo of interesting characters. The clear choice to me was idea number 2. The short, monkey like bodied, Jester with the obtuse obese rich character.
Taking this further was great fun. Making character for the bodies is always my favorite past. I based this almost entirely off Venetian Masquerade balls and celebrations. It was amazing fun, and somewhere I wouldnt usually look at. So it was interesting. I based these characters slightly off Gothic Literature for the sake of it; The fat character the Marquis based off The Bloody Chamber the Gothic novelette and the Jackal based off The Cask of Amontillado. This gives my characters some real depth.
From there it was just taking everything further to get a real character that can really work. There was alot of focus on Masks, especially ones that capture both the Venetian look AND the character I want to portray. That was great fun for me, far more interesting than their costumes. But with these characters their body shape is far more interesting than their outfits so I got to focus less on that.
Colour I'm still not sure on, and as I'm starting to build it all in 3D max. But that I'm going to explore this more when it comes to Texturing. But that isn't what I want to look at right now.
I wanted to look at my design processes. I've done this concept twice now. Concept Two is this, my Venetian styled characters decedent and fancy. Concept One was my mage and her familiar.
I don't exactly want to look at the end results, but more how I got there. I was told to redo this concept, and I want to see whether that was a deserved decision. The major differences in this were in Concept Two I did far stronger silhouette research. I think that this does make my second concept have alot more strength to it, indeed. By redoing these processes I found out more efficient ways to do and explore these things. But I started these projects in very different ways.
Concept One I started off with two words. Mage and Monster. This gave me an extremely wide area to explore. Now in Concept Two I didnt have that, was told not to do that as it would ruin my character processes. Thats the part I look back on, and now disagree. Giving myself somewhere to start I think made designing more efficient.
In the end starting from nothing in Concept Two did take me in unexpected places. I was fist looking at a tribal cave man type idea with a father and son and ended up completely different. But that also happened in my first Concept, which apparently wasn't believed. I originally considered using a victorian court dress sort of design and really exagerated evil and a rock Golem look. Of course not as big a change, but thats because I was focused. Being focused let me make something stronger that I've been more happy about, and still push myself. Concept Two I don't feel happy with. I feel that starting from nothing and just seeing where it goes is a far weaker process, for me anyway.
I just wanted to write this part of the post to explain that, now looking back at it after trying both. Both ways are good and have their merits. I'm glad I did both and I do see why I should of restarted. But personally I think starting with some prompt even if its just words is far smarter. It seems more professional more industry oriented and just gives better results, in my opinion. FYI this isnt an angry blog post. I just wanted to explore and compare the last few weeks.
No comments:
Post a Comment