I&VN Tracing and character design

3/4/17 - Week 2
GCD60204, Hafiz Zamri
Illustration and Visual Narrative
Tracing and character design

Lecture 2/Tutorial 2
The first part of the lecture was a review of the Vormator creatures we had previously designed in Week 1. Mr. Hafiz talked quite a bit about proportion, use of color and dominant shapes which made certain Vormator designs more visually appealing than others.

He then proceeded to give us a lecture on the topic of character design. We spoke about basic primitive shapes, and how they can be used to give characters "personality". For example, a character whose dominant shape is a circle tends to be fun-loving and jovial in nature, whilst a character that's based off a triangle tends to be mysterious in nature, and tends to be either good or bad. We looked at a variety of examples in which dominant shapes were used, such as the monsters from Monster Inc., cartoon characters from shows like Adventure Time and The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, and even Darth Vader from Star Wars. In our next practical class, we would attempt to create our very own character designs using paper cutouts as dominant shapes.

Exercise 02
In the tutorial segment of the lesson, we were to trace an image of a Chiaroscuro pear in Adobe Illustrator. I created the general silhouette of the pear by using the Pen tool.

Figure 1. Half the pear was lit, while the other was blanketed by a shadow. It was our job to imagine what the other half looked like. 

I then began to work on the color of the pear by creating paths inside the silhouette itself, attempting to follow the light and dark boundaries of the pear while at the same time trying to follow its contours, in order to further pronounce its shape. I sampled the colors of my own tracing from the original image, to keep it as realistic as possible.

Figure 2. From left to right - First draft of the tracing with shadows and highlights, the paths used to create the final pear tracing, the final draft of the pear with adjusted lines and more detail. 

With the tracing done, our next assignment was to create our own cool version of the pear by manipulating light, shadow and shape to make the pear more interesting.

My idea to make the pear interesting was to turn it into a construction site; complete with cranes, paintwork, scaffolding and such. I then added little pear people as construction workers to give the whole thing a more lively and somewhat childish look to it. The crane and other equipment were all created using the Rectangle, Pen and Line tools. The pear people are just a silhouette of the original pear I traced, I did this to save time.

Figure 3. Pear-in-progress. 

I somewhat rushed the project a bit, but overall I was satisfied with the final draft given how much time I had.

Practical 1

Exercise 03
Our first practical involved cutting out primitive shapes from colored paper and then sticking them onto white/black paper. We were then to draw a character using the cutout as a dominant shape.

Figure 4. Black pentagon cutout, black pitt pens and white charcoal.

My favorite one is a gem character whose dominant shape is an upside down pentagon. Its got 2 metallic arms, 4 metallic legs, straps to carry a sack, one eye with a goggle over it, exhaust pipes coming from its back and a little bulb attached to a headband. Its job is to look around and collect gems, which it chucks in its sack.