Sunday 25 January 2015

Week 17 - Character Project Preparation & Life Drawing

Reference and Moodboard

In preparation for my upcoming project I have began collecting various forms of photographic reference. Some presenting, people around me like my friends; while other showing different types of clothing and accessories. This is more of a visual library for me, one that I can return to later, especially when I get stuck or need to think up of more ideas. I plan to check through all the images and photographs to then decide on those most useful to me. I can then put them together into a usable moodboard  to use for the Character Project. Apart from this I will later on need to look for already existing paintings, art pieces and images which I could use for a Colour Reference Board. I hope for this to help me decide on more appropriate colour schemes and styles for my character ideas. 

One character idea I was thinking about was the blacksmith, but I have designed a blacksmith house in a past project, so this time I was hoping to focus on something else. Then I came across the idea of a witch character which was very interesting, but I still prefered something less fantasy like. Eventually I decided on designing a butcher. I found this to be the best character for me to try and design at this time, if anything goes wrong I can always go back and try making a different one.

Some of the photographs I collected of members of a Viking Re-Enactment Society. I was really interested in some of the hairstyles shown on the photos. Their weapons, clothing (some of which is authentic) and accessories such as belts are a great source of inspiration which I can use within my design process. The last photograph shows my friend holding up one of the shields with really nice decorating and patterns. There are tens of other photographs which I've collected myself, but unfortunately there's too many to post on the blog and so I've decided to pick a few interesting ones that I could share here.

My Face Topology (My friends called it Topor-ology)


















As the character I'll be designing will be based on my appearance/body, I started to prepare some photographs of my body and face. As shown on the photographs above, I made sure they allign as accurately as possible with eachother when I took them (there were many attmepts). This ensured that my following steps were easier. The following task was to draw a rough topology of my face on top of these photographs. I've made sure to have a shadow casting on either side of my face; this enabled me to see the various bumps and depth changes in my face. I drew the coloured loops on the left image first to get a rough idea where certain edges should be placed and where the could connect. After I have placed most of the lines down and marked where they connect, I moved onto the other image. I then drew grey horizontal lines across the images to transfer and redraw the topology on the right photograph.




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