Character development

This exercise is about character development. I began by collecting together examples of different types of characters in order to understand how different character traits are portrayed visually.

Most of the characters have some aspect of their features exagerated. For example, children tend to have big heads and big eyes; whereas villains tend to have long faces and angular eyes. Superheroes and adventurers are all tall, fit or muscly and have their sexual features exagerated and highlighted, for example through being oversized, wearing tight fitting clothes and the really odd habit of male superheroes wearing their pants outside of their other clothes.

The pose that the character adopts is also important. I really love the confidence or even arrogance that it implied by the foxes and blue tit standing tall. Superheroes and adventurers have dynamic positions; whereas villains are slightly curled up to imply cunning.

The clothes and props that the characters carry help to develop the character. The villains have angular, jagged clothing. Adventurers wear clothing that is roughed up. The adventurers and superheroes often carry weapons.

The use of colour in the images is also important. For example the use of green in the images of villains may imply envy and jealousy. The use of vibrant colours for children and animals implies fun and happiness.

The next step of this exercise is to begin to develop a character. For this, I decided to develop the character of Lucille who accidentally appeared in the previous exercise. She is a magical, slightly whimsical superhero cat off on adventures to help save the world.

I began by thinking about Lucille’s facial features and also how anthropomorphic her body should be. Her face and body posture will be important in expressing her emotions. I tried lots of different ways of drawing the head – braking it down into a few simple lines, exagerating features, making it cartoony, trying out different expressions. In the end I settled on something semi-realistic but with exagerated features. I also tried using different colours for Lucille – she is a whimsical cat, so could be a whimsical colour.

I then thought more about Lucille’s body. I was, and still am, unsure how anthropomorphic I want Lucille to be. There seems something more whimsical about keeping her in a cat-like pose. I was reminded of the cats in Beatrix Potter books. I think that Lucille is a ‘gentle superhero’ so I don’t want her to look aggressive, carry weapons, etc. Clothing wise I compromised and gave her a little superhero cape. I also gave her a cocky but also slightly silly stance.

This exercise did make me think more about how to develop characters. However, I’m not that pleased with the end result. I think that the character I have developed is quite generic. I wonder if I should have kept Lucille as more of a cat, rather than allowing her to walk on two legs. I also think that different media would help to give her a more whimsical feel – for example, I think that the pencil crayons in the previous exercise do this better. Maybe some light ink or watercolour washes would also work quite well. I think she would also benefit from having the magic carpet from the last exercise. I love sketching in black fineliner – it’s really quick and enables me to think while sketching. However, maybe it is also a little limiting and I should play with different media more.