Week 7 - Character Design One Final

This week I managed to finally finish my 2D character design in Photoshop, I am very pleased with the outcome and I am particularly pleased with how dynamic the pose is and the use of colour. As you can see I have spent most time shading the character, this was a big deal for me, and before I could move in on minute detail and the colouring stages, I felt I needed to get the lighting perfect.

When i first created my character I did so using colour, she is an air elemental so she will be blue with an aura of a lighter shade surrounding her external form, but to achieve this I started out with a simple piece of line work. I contemplated the different potential poses, and when I was happy I took it into Photoshop  and from scratch, I drew out my pose.

I prefer to do things by eye and occasionally look at reference, by loading an image into Photoshop and drawing over the top, I feel as if I'm cheating and limiting myself by trying to follow the guidelines of a drawing. By starting with a grey background and just the brush tool, I feel like i have a lot more freedom, and it also allows for "happy mistakes" .

Once I had finished the line work I started to move in with shading the figure, this was difficult I wasn't sure whether I should use opacity jitter with pen pressure, or to manually control the opacity itself. In the end, I went with the opacity jitter, it allowed for more blended skin tones.

When i had the skin tone down to a T it was literally just trial and error of adding more and more, i decided to add the clothing and make the character look quite natural so accessories were minimal.

Below you will find my final design.