Applied Animation: Character Concepts - Death

Creating character sheets is something that I have never really done properly, which sounds ridiculous since I do animation. However, I've never really placed this much thought into my character deign before, but it's safe to say that I actually really enjoyed it, as it meant that I now have a few ideas to work from. It also allows me to create a character I am happy with 100% rather than having a character I have simply 'settled' for.

Because I am new to this, I decided to start off by creating a base template that I could work over to create my different designs. And to make it easier, I rotoscoped over images of a skull and skeleton so I didn't end up spending ages on trying to get it right. Rotoscoping is yet another technique that I am new to, which I found quite easy to do and it may be something I look into doing when I come to animate my animation to reduce the work load and to make it slightly easier for myself. 

To start with I chose a design that I thought at first was quite simple, but this would change when I came to create more designers. I wanted to create a big, loose fitting cloak that was usually seen on the typical grim reaper character. However, I also wanted it to be my own. I was really pleased with my first design and because of old habits I was willing to settle for this design, but I pushed myself to create a few more, to see if I could create something that I liked better. At this point I was also thinking about the colour of the skeleton and possible colours for the cloak.

This led me to create a simpler design that was similar to the first one and it was here that I realised the first design would be difficult to animate, as there'd be a lot of overlapping action to consider and it would make it very difficult to do. Although I had made this design simpler I wasn't 100% happy with the design and I felt that it was lacking in some way but I couldn't say why or how, it just wasn't what I was looking for, it didn't create enough mystery or go with the mood and tone I pictured for the animation. So I continued to design cloaks.

After my third attempt I finally came up with a design that I felt I was happy with. I really like how the cloak creates a sense of mystery with the hood creating shadow over the face. I also like the simple design, as this will make it easier to animate However, there will still be elements of overlapping, which is something I am going to have to experiment with, as I'm not very familiar with the principle and I feel that I will need some practice with it. Although I am very pleased with this design I do feel that it needs some tweaking and after asking a few of my peers what they thought of the design, I decided that I am going to add the sleeves from the first design to this design and I will use this as my final design for the cloak. 

Once I have finally created my cloak design I decided to begin experimenting with colours for the character. I'd already begun to think about this when I created the first design sheet, but I needed to go back and select the colours I thought matched the description of the character the best, as I was creating this character based on the description taken from the book. This led me to focus on yellowed-whites and aged colours such as beige and even brown. From the colours I had sampled on the first design sheet I chose the base colours that I liked the most and began with those. I then used different shades of the base colours to create tone and shade within the final drawings. Because the character will always be under his cloak, I don't feel that I need to focus too much on these colours and because I'm happy with this experimentation I think it will be okay to leave it at this and use this colour scheme for my animation.