O-Techu ---- Kickoff
Hi!
"O-Techu" is a rather light playground project in my free time due to the missing heavyness of functionality but nonetheless enjoyable!
.
This project's restrictions:
.
"Design deliverables: illustrations of characters with no background, used for a fictional 2d digital card game
- anime styled
- general mood: soft, warm, calm
- preferred: analogous colours
- 3 ingame character classes"
Massaged, oiled and glossy works - social media is stuffed with it. I'm missing balance: The content that people shared to show how they approach design tasks in detail.
Ranting doesn't help so here's my contribution - sheets sharing my workflow and decision making to build the ground for character illustrations.
A one-sheet-warm up. The sheet itself is pretty blank as its sole purpose is to get my thoughts focused on a certain style I have in mind - like going for a walk to think.
After warming up I sketch down mentioned thoughts.
symmetry tool for the win
I restrict myself to 3 different character classes and need to make sure, the form language communicates the character's belonging to each of them
Served myself a glas of coke mixed with a bit of red wine.
Checking the current sketches and their compatibility with each other.
Taking my glasses off ( I got -5 dioptres) to find out how the shapes work and where the eyes focuses on
After shapes are chosen, they need to be coloured. To help me not get astray in wild and neverending colour explosions I quickly note down the function of colour in this project: viewer's emotional perception of the character
Usually people tend to do faces first, but as they can easily be the main carrier of an expression I usually design them later to make sure the potential of everything else is not overlooked
Glas of coke with a bit of a bit of red wine is missing half its volume. Also added potential technical detail= more depth in functionality although I decided to stay shallow with this project. Bad girl.
A striped background helps to balance the appereance of colour.
Checking the face sketches for accidental repetitions or similarities
Designing poses, checking - again - for repetitions and similarities.
Coke with a bit of red wine is emtpied. My asian genes again, surpremely efficient.
Also: Thinking about how to stylise colour language.
Tadaa - that's it! A fun kick off, indeed.
Now that I look at all this softness I need a good dose of older works of Masaaki Yuasa for balance.
