Art Fundamentals + Character design

in art fundamentals we learnt about line, shape and form as well as proportion; Completing tasks and learning the basics

Lines are what makes art and without it there is no art as everything even minuet things are created out of lines. Lines can be used to highlight the outside of something or to illustrate detail. They can be utilised to create the illusion of texture as well. In terms of art, a liner does not have to be a traditional 'line'; dots, dashes, and even cross hatching are all examples of line work.

SHAPE

When a line begins and finishes at the same spot, it forms a shape.
All basic geometric shapes, such as squares, circles, triangles, and hexagons, are simply lines that move in specified ways.
Everything in the real world is made up of extremely basic shapes that can be further broken down into shapes.

Shapes are two-dimensional, which means they are flat.
When you combine forms with lines, you may make larger and more complicated things, add depth and individuality to your work, and assist create the illusion of 3D.

FORM

Form is what happens when we mix various 2D pieces to create something that appears to be three-dimensional.
If the shape is a circle, the form is either a sphere or a cylinder, depending on how we combined elements and what we came up with.

COLOUR THEORY AND CONCEPT ART:

What is Colour Theory? (notes)
Colour Theory is the connotations made by human nature, red is hot, blue is cold, etc.
Hue - is the actual dominant wave length colour (blue, red, yellow)
saturation- is the measurement or how pure the colour is compared to black or gray.
tone- is a broad term for not pure colours
complementary - opposite sides of the colour wheel (red, green. orange, blue)
analogous - a relaxing colour combination using colours that are near each other
triad - placed like a triangle
split complimentary
monochromatic
colours and emotions

typical colour groupings

Perspective. 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Creating A Character From Scratch!

First thing to worry about is the restrictions I will face when creating this character, the brief, or I guess the requirements are as follows: to create a character based on a setting of your choice. These are the settings to choose from:

IDEAS:

Midevil Wizard Bounty hunter

CyberPunk Alien engineer

wild west mummy reincarnated

female Noir detective

Midevil Wizard Bounty hunter - this would be cool. maybe not a wizard but like something magical and devious.

Silhouetting/thumb-nailing

Fast idea generation for helping my creative juices flow is very important

Steps to thumbnailing:

doing minute or two drawings of ideas. if ideas come do them immediately.
more ideas = more changes
the more ideas mean that you can change these things within a couple ideas.
Try different designs as they come into my head
One character can be fleshed out using silhouetting. Start with thumbnailing then use silhouetting and then use line art to sketch these concepts.

without this you will miss details.
silhouetting can create simplicity and isn't as time eating

Landscapes can be aided by this as well

Landscapes can be aided by this as well
as well as buildings such as Laura Bevon

Riley Spark - Story

Riley Spark had no choice but to live in the slums of mars, she had no past; and seemingly no future. these shacks and tunnels is all shes ever known. Laying under the sea of stars she dreams of whats out there and maybe an answer to her lost past, the only clue she has is within a photo containing her on earth, and a globe with a pinpoint on a location in north america.
Working under a engineers apprentice called Clint Icaru, Riley knows her way around a garage and is incredibly clumsy. tends to shock or hurt herself by accident via using her patented "if i touch it and dont die, its ok". she plans to make a ship and visit earth, or at least whats left of earth...
She has a pet monkey that she has had ever since she arrived at mars. The monkey is mechanically enhanced so it can breath in mars' denser oxygen as well as other enhancements.
Clint Icaru is an ancient man with only one eye, some call him crazy but to Riley its the only family shes ever had.
Her goal is to answer the questions of her past. whatever it may take

Riley has shorter messy hair that is always tied up, its fuzzy and has grey streaks from the various electric mishaps in the shop - Clint finds it hilarious.
Eyes which sparkle in the sun, colour is a very dark brown that are almost indistinguishable from the pupil. they are hooded and large
She has tanned skin from the martian heat and blaring sun; the skin has marks from her mishaps and is cracked in places. From this you can tell her biological parents are different in skin-tone.
Riley's face has large over-emphasized features and cartoonishly shows her personality via her larger lips and nose. and the expressiveness in her eyes show a comedic side to the character.
Her leg is missing and is replaced with a runners leg that Clint created. she owns a collection of them from as shes grown up. This signifies her loss of family-ties and her direct loss of her memory proceeding her arrival at mars.
the pet monkey is adapted for the mars climate and is a fuzzy little goblin that can withstand pretty much anything- you can thank Clint for that.

Mood Boards and Ideas:

Riley Sparks colour scheme and overall theme within context to the story:

The use of the colour scheme has multiple layers of meaning when connoting it to the character: You might first think immediately that this is in reference to the " We Can Do it" posters made to empower women in WW2, as women were encouraged to take wartime jobs in defense industries and solidified itself in the history of female patriotism. Riley, as a character, is a female engineer and takes inspiration from this wartime period not only as a woman, but as a worker.

Another, similar connotation is the use of red and white in combination, a choice I made to mimic the red and white seen in propaganda in the 19th and early 20th century with the Soviets and Americans. the deliberate use of this shows that Riley is easily manipulated by others, so far as to say that she could get into dangerous situations in her future.

Following propaganda, my choice with Riley's colour scheme is a reference to soviet and american space race posters of the 1950s and 60s. A key part of Riley's story is her interest in space travel and one day returning to earth to uncover her past so i wanted to reflect that within her character.

(Calling back to the mood boards and mind maps i made at the start helped me identify a colour scheme, however i did experiment in my sketching phase with different colour schemes to find out what works best for Riley. As expected the blue red and white worked the best but it was useful to understand these colour theory principles.)

The white is her sense of purity, Riley's plight in mars has restricted her to the slums and darkness of the streets. However, as this is all shes ever known, she isn't conscious to the condition shes in and the white can show the naivete.

The use of red shows her love, her compassion and her drive to succeed, its seemingly destiny to her that she succeeds with getting back to earth, the red shows her confidence in achieving this goal.

My mood board looking at the style i wanted to use made me look at fallout's vault boy design and the art style of those drawings. Wide thick lines and oversimplified colours added this extra cartoonish layer to Riley.

When viewers look at Riley they might get that sense of obliviousness and naivete, and i did that exactly to show what journey she would go on.

art progress:

Evaluation:

This project taught me a lot about how the process of character creation works. I am very happy with the progress I made and the story I made for the character. I didn't expect for most of my work to be preparation for the art and it was good to see the entire process. I faced some time constraints and as my art skills are worse than some others, I couldn't make the idea that was planted in my head. I made due with what I could do and created art that works with my skills.

My skills are slowly developing, and it means the art I create is the best that I can do for the time. Given that this is my first time doing detailed characters, I still need more time to refine this skill in particular.