Animation - Character Design

Character design is an essential part of animation. Characters help bring animation to life and helps viewers identify with the story, and characters that are well-developed and designed draw more attention from viewers. The character can be a simple shape or has a very complex design, but if the character is well-designed and developed, it will help with the animation greatly and enable people to identify with the characters.

The task is to create a character based on three famous characters from established series. These characters range from superheroes to video game villains. From this, three characters have been chosen:

The first character is Optimus Prime from the Transformers series. He is easy to identify as he is marked by his characteristic red, blue and white colors, as well as the unique shape of his head and bulky build. He is also known to be a wise leader to his Autobot comrades, and is generally a well-liked hero in the series.

The second character is Deadpool (Wade Wilson) from the Marvel Comics series. He is an anti-hero and is famous mostly for his very talkative nature and his tendency to 'break the 4th wall' in the comics. He has a very twisted sense of humor, so to speak, and his eccentricity is what makes him a very interesting character despite some of his questionable actions.

The third character is Xemnas from Kingdom Hearts, a collaborative video game series between Disney and Japanese video game developer Square Enix. In the series, Xemnas is a recurring villain, first appearing in Kingdom Hearts II and made other appearances in Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days and the recently released Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance. Xemnas is the leader of a group known as Organization XIII, and is easily marked by his black coat, silver hair and amber eyes. Personality-wise, he is a very cold and ruthless person, known to resort to anything in order to achieve his goals. Even though he is a villain, he is one of the more well-liked characters from the series, mostly due to the visual appeal of his physical features, as well as his personality. 

From these three characters, a new character is to be designed based on them. 

Character 1

The first character is based on Optimus Prime. Because drawing robots are not exactly a skill I'm good at, I started off with drawing the original character first, so that I know, briefly, how the body works.

From the original design, a few sketches of the head of the new character is made:

This character is very difficult to do due to a lack of skill in drawing non-organic forms, so in the end I never did go through with the design. But I ended up drawing a brief sketch of how the new character would have looked like:

Instead of drawing the character as bulky as how Optimus looked like, I decided to go for a more rounded, cuter design. The character is supposed to be much smaller in size and very childlike.

Character 2

For the second character, I played around with the size and gender of the character so that it would look markedly different from Deadpool.

Here, I tried creating a younger character, and tried drawing a female character instead of a male character. Firstly I tried sticking to the 'hidden identity' factor and drew the characters with masks on.

Then I started playing around with the size, and took off the mask from the character. The second character here has a bit of an appeal from the others, so that character is chosen.

Then I started playing around with the size of the character and simplified it a little, so the character would be easier to draw when animated. 

After establishing the character to be drawn, I created a simple character sheet for her. She is a little bit bright, and a little naughty. She's probably the kind of person who loves playing pranks on other people.

Character 3

The work flow of the third character follows the same steps as the second character. Here, I tried to create a much younger character based on Xemnas - younger by leagues, so to speak. I've also experimented with drawing a female character, but decided to stick to drawing a male character instead. The resulting character is a boy who always has the hood of his jacket up. 

Then I made a character sheet for him, too:

This character seems like he doesn't talk much, and would prefer to be on his own than be in the company of other people. He's not very sociable, at first glance.

Character design is actually a very complex process. Here, the principle of solid drawing is very important, and some unique traits of the character need to stand out so that it could be easily identified by viewers.