Here I had 40 characters to design. I was given a list to start me off but then I had to come up with character ideas myself.
I ended up with:
During this exercise I noticed that my drawings got worse about half way through. I think this is because I had been drawing for a long time and lost patience. The brief asked me to draw the characters with pencil. I tried to do this however I wasn’t able to draw them with enough detail to my satisfaction at such a small scale. To fix this I drew in Photoshop. Here I was able to draw as I would with pencil and rescale the sketches.
My sketches were fairly simple. I used angular shapes and simple lines to suggest details. The hands I drew are just suggested as empty shapes that vaguely resemble hands. This is because the details in hands are harder to draw, especially at such a small size. I liked leaving the eyes blank as they didn’t over complicate things and over crowd he face. Depth could be added to the eyes with shading and colour. My work on proportion and clothing needs improving. The creases in the clothing don’t match how where they would appear in reality, so they make the sketches look awkward and ruins the feeling of flow. The costume designs also weren’t very original. I tried not to create stereotypical sketches and go with what felt natural when designing the characters, while still making them recognisable. Although simple I think colour would help the sketches look more lively and detailed.
For the second part of this exercise I had to draw one of my characters into the empty space of the above panel. I chose the courier as I felt that it was the most developed (though at the time of drawing the character my mind blanked on the motor part and just registered the cycling part). I added a short “delivery!” to make clear that the character is a courier and add a little narrative to the images. I didn’t feel anything else was needed to make clear what was happening.
Illustration log 