1st concept designs

CHARACTER design

Sketches/ ideas:

My director and producer usually really liked the first sketches that I made for a character which is why I don’t really have that many different sketch experiments/ variations.

In our project the main character of the story is a detective so my first task as the character designer was of course to design a detective. When I think about what a detective looks like, the picture that instantly pops into my head is the classic trench coat and fedora hat. It makes the character stand out and gives him a classy/ mysterious look which is exactly the kind of look we wanted our detective to have.

We eventually decided it would be best to lose the fedora because its not really necessary, we need to be able to see the detective’s face properly, and also it would be a little more difficult to animate.

The second most important character in our story is the Priest, who is the antagonist of our story. He was supposed to look evil and mysterious which is why his face is so sharp. Our director also really wanted the priest to have these round glasses where you can’t really see his eyes through them, which was a really nice touch since it added to the whole evil/mysterious vibe.

Maya made some very pretty designs for the daughter and the witch that our director and producer really liked so they asked me if I could try them out in my style. I had to make all the official designs in order for us to have a consistent style in all the official character designs.

tests – EXPERIMENTS

In my final design I decided to use the signature trench coat trope because that way I think you can immediately tell he is a detective from first glance. It also makes sense for him to wear a large coat because our story takes place in Romania which is a pretty cold country and under the large coat, the detective Is wearing a button-up shirt, a tie, and suit pants, so he needs the coat to keep warm. I tried out many different colour variations, but we decided to go with the blue-ish colour pallet to imply that he is some kind of police detective

The witch’s colour pallet was especially challenging for me at first. I wasn’t really satisfied with the tests I did, and I didn’t really know what to go with. When I talked to Tommie and Thea they said that she doesn’t necessarily have to have traditional Romanian clothing but also not very fancy fantasy witch clothing either. Which made me really confused as to what colours to use on her. Eventually I reached out to Thea saying that I’m struggling with the colour pallet and she made a rough coloured design over my tests to show me what she had in mind. I then re-coloured it and cleaned it up and it looked really good . From there I made some colour edits of that design and that’s how the final design came about.

We struggled a bit with the final design of the priest. Thea made the fist drafts of the priest’s clothing and I then worked on them. We wanted the priest to look authentically Romanian so we did some research on the Romanian priest vestments and found some references to base our designs on. Later on our director was contemplating between two different designs so I combined them together along with the references I found to create the final priest design.