Design Lab

Here is one long post showing you the process I took to create 7 character designs in my Drawing for Game Art class. 

The first part is to create 100 abstract silhouettes. I used the program Alchemy to create the shapes and cleaned them up in photoshop just to keep myself from defaulting to creating human figures. I usually do not like a lack of control, but this process turned out to be fast and fun. I took some time to combine some silhouettes just to challenge myself to look for good composition and not worry if it actually looked like something.   

The next step was to create 50 doodles. I was not so excited for this one. I was trying so hard to keep from making human figures I feel I went to far and that made pulling a character out of these very difficult. 

The third way we created character designs was with texture drawing. I pulled 50 textures from the internet and CG textures. I drew "what I saw" within 20 of them. You can see that some of the figures are incomplete, so I took the liberty to complete the form in the margins of the page.

This is the first pass on 10 roughs. 7 of these are taken from silhouette, and three are form the doodles. As you can see, the silhouettes have a variety of character, and all I could see in the doodles were fairies...don't do that. 

Refining part 2: 7 total roughs. 3 from silhouette, 2 from doodles, and 2 from the texture drawings. Here we had the liberty to start adding in local tone to help describe the breakdown of the forms. 

One parallel part of the assignment we needed to have was something called a force-fit. We were each given an animal, man-made object/machine, and an adjective. Mine was Anteater, Chainsaw, Filthy. Then we had to draw three roughs of a combination of 2 out of the three given themes. 

Here is a refined stage of the force-fit. I fixed some of the forms, refined the way the chainsaw blade looked, and jammed all three themes into the top drawing.

From all of that we were required to have one design from each method (Silhouette, doodle, and texture drawing) We also had to include one of the force-fits, and one of the silhouette designs needed to be from someone else's group of silhouette. 

To top it all off we were required to have clear light direction, and clean line work. The style and rendering was left up to us. I was heavily inspired by Mucha's line work, and the rendering from an art book, "Massive Black" by Ballistic. I added in some texture from GC textures on my filthy anteater chainsaw, the fairy, and used photoshop's cutout filter on the rhino thing. Other than those there is not much texture in the designs. If I was to take these even further I would continue to kit-bash textures and filters on top of the designs.