Evaluation

For this project, we were asked to make anything we wanted using the skills we have learnt throughout the year. For this, I decided to make a character using the skills I learnt in graphics when we made character designs for a video game. I chose this as I felt that I could put all my effort into it as I enjoy doing it and I could provide a lot of work for it as there's a lot that needs to be done for it. But it wasn't just a normal character design sheet. Once I had the final design I animated the final character as I wanted it to stand out among other character designs. 

Firstly, I started by looking into other turnaround sheets to get some idea as to how a character design is laid out. It gave me an ideas to what to include and what poses I should put my character in. I decided to go with simple poses that show the body from different angles along with a palette of the colours I used. However, when designing the characters, I drawn them in a pose, did a close up of the face and drawn the weapon. I also wrote a short brief of their backstory to get a gist of their personality. This was to help me decide what type of character I wanted to create for my final design. 

To improve my characters design, I looked at different character designs and one of my favorite artists who is also an animator and character designer. After testing out the artist Asurocks style, I tried the style in different materials so I could decide what would be best to do my final character design in. I decided to go with just graphics. I particularly liked the way she would draw a female face, so I thought that combining the way she draws faces with my own style will give me the face I need to match the characteristics of my character perfectly. 
Not only did the artist help me, but looking at other character designs helped me look at different styles I could draw as well as clothing and facial expressions. 

When it came to my final design, I decided to combine all my character designs. I took different aspects from the three different designs to try and create a character that mostly appealed to my audience that I asked. 
I started with a few rough sketches trying to include what my audience wanted. I later developed them and added certain features like weakness' and strengths along with more detail to their clothing. I tried to incorporate as much of their personality in their clothing as possible so I didn't have to fully depend on their facial features telling the audience their personality. For example, I designed a girl who adored technology, so I put a circuit design on some parts of her clothing as well as giving her a computer screen as a mask. 
Once the character designs were done, I drawn a rough character using the best parts from each character. I later developed this and drawn it digitally. From here, I went onto deciding her weapon and backstory. Since my character was made for the graphic novel RWBY, I tried to relate her backstory to match somewhat of the characters that already exist. After getting her backstory and traits done, I altered her face to give off her flirty, elegant personality. i also looked into what poses would convey her particular traits more. Since i have trouble with poses, I looked up an artist and used their templates as reference. 
This is when I started designing the turnaround sheet, I took the poses I thought would show the body from good angles and looked at different pallets. I eventually designed my own through trail and error. Using ibisPaint X, I was able to create a turnaround sheet I was proud of. I used the  standard brush tool to get the base colour of the design, the smudge tool to create large areas of shading and the air brush tool to add a bit more shading to ares a missed as well as a light pink taint in my characters cheeks. Looking at her design, I thought she looked rather plain and that her clothes didn't quite show her elegance. I asked around and I got recommended to add some jewellery. I thought that gold would compliment the dark blue and grey so that was the colour I used.       
Looking back at my turnaround sheet, I  realised that there was a lot that I could improve on, for example the side angle. She didn't look like the same character. In the future, I will try to avoid this by drawing the face multiple times. 

As for the animation I made using Photoshop (that ended up not working so I had to use a website on Google), I thought that I could of done far better if I had only managed my time better. The overall animation came out rushed and some of the line art was missing from one of the frames as well as part of her clothing missing from all frames. I didn't draw enough frames, resulting in the animation looking choppy. This is something I will practice in the future. The animation in the end ended up having 200-300 delay but because of the lack of frames it looked as if it was lagging. Overall, I am satisfied with the design but not with the final piece seeing as my time could of been managed better.