For this brief we were tasked with conceptulizing and creating two characters which were a Protagonist and an Antagonist. We were give a series of words to use as a starting point/inspiration; vaudeville, nuclear, gothic, organic, kitsch, mythical, clandestine and titan. The words organic, clandestine and titan appealed to e the most so I used them as my starting point.
I didn't want to over develop a plot for this brief, not wanting spend to much time hung up on the backstory, so at first I just decided on a basic storyline and theme for the 'setting' my characters would exist in. I mainly drew inspiration from video games and one of my methods of research was to pull out some of my old video games that I remebered really enjoying the characters of and played them; with my focus more on the characters than anything else. After that I moved on to some more in depth research and looked at the concept art and character design for those games. The games that I found the most appealing styles- and story-wise were Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Mass Effect 1-3 and Fallout 3/The Elder Scrolls and Thief.
I ended up very much leaning towards a sci-fi/medieval(fantasy) mix and continued my research with that in mind.
After research and intital concept developement I had decided on my protagonist (Vera-63) and my antagonist (XNSS-Q7 (The Bull)), and was ready to do their turnarounds. A portion of my research had been devoted to looking into other character designs and how they'd been done so I felt that gave me good insight into how to go about it; things like marking out grids to keep proportions accurate etc. I think ultimately doing the turnaround helped me really nail down aspects of my character that I might not have thought out fully beforehand.
Once that was done it was much easier to imagine getting the maquettes done because I had grown used to the proportions and had an accurate visual guide to help the process along.
It was my first time working with modelling clay but once I'd gotten the first maquette done the whole process felt much easier and enjoyable. I was very happy with the results, especially with the maquette for my antagonist character. Smaller, more finicky details took the most time but I feel they added to the overall look in the end.
After maquettes the next deliverable that needed to be completed was the vectors, one for each character.
The vectors were made all the easier by the research I'd done into color palettes so I didn't have to use up valuable time in the project trying to decide what to go for because I'd already made the decisions.
