Getting to Know the Characters
The previous two assignments were for designing the characters and choosing an approach. In this section I will be using what I have established so far and see how it works in practice, and I will be establishing a color palette for our five-man band. The point is to make the characters move and interact with each other, both to further develop their personalities and dynamics and to find chinks in their designs. The final results of this assignment are five simple vignettes featuring two or three of the characters. Unlike a half-page spread or a full page, a vignette is without background and little other environmental elements. In the context of a storybook, a vignette brings attention to the action or expression of the character in contrast to a full illustration with atmosphere and other story elements. This style of illustration is also very popular on social media because when one scrolls quickly on a small screen, a full illustration does not register as well as one or two characters on a white background.
I started with getting to know the designs I made by sketching them multiple times. They are not consistent by any means, but that is to be expected at this stage. I probably have to draw each of them at least one or two hundred times before they are truly consistent in every drawing. Not that these characters are yet in a place where they ought to remain unchanged. Fine tuning their designs is basically what I will be doing this entire series of assignments, even as I will start illustrating real pages of the story. Even in high caliber projects, like Genndy Tartakovsky animations with an entire team, one can see how the characters change and evolve over time, even if it’s only a subtle change in proportion and not a whole redesign. He talks about it in an interview.
Above are some sketches with the main shapes of the characters and how they relate to each other. It’s important to keep in mind what shapes I had in mind when I originally created them together. Morten, the soldier, is supposed to be tall and wide, a bit square. Verner, the main character, is shorter and slimmer and often wears a cape so he is more of a rectangle. Runa, the robber girl, is an hourglass with the poofy hair on top and the wide trousers on the bottom. Maia, the fairy, is small and has lots of circles because of her hair and glasses. Ida, the snow queen, is tall and pointy, lots of triangles. I have to do more of these and really solidify the shapes, I’m not completely sold on some things like Morten’s proportions and Maia’s dress shape.
Further explorations below. The drawings are rough, meant for practice. Some of them were done with photo reference. Especially for hair. I also had to go to my own character sheets multiple times because I wasn’t sure about an element or another. One would think I would remember my own designs!
I have a Pinterest board full of reference from faces to hair to weaponry. I learned a lot about flintlock guns, military sabers, and late 18th century corsetry. I’m modeling Morten’s musket after the at the time popular India Pattern aka the “Brown Bess”, just as a fun fact. And Maia’s stays/wing harness are an early version of short stays, though she wears them with a slightly older style of dress. An interesting note on her design: I had to do away with the tiny glasses and replace them with much larger ones. Because of technology at the time, and possibly also fashion, all eyeglasses were much smaller than the myriads of larger styles we prefer today. The tiny glasses/old association is strong enough that the design felt permanently less youthful with them on. This is only a problem because I want her to look cute and young, so what I did was simply make the glasses much larger.
I also experimented with some more traditional coloring materials before moving on to digital, just to see where my instincts take me. These were done with gouache in my sketchbook.
Making a Color Palette
It’s important to have recognizable color pallets for one’s characters, especially if one wants them to be read clearly when they are at a distance or when they’re on small screen. Above are some images with popular characters, reduced only to blobs of color. They are still perfectly recognizable. I am not certain if I managed quite the same iconic levels of design, but I tried my best to keep the colors distinct among themselves and harmonious. I started by using the values I had already established in the previous assignments and then built with color on top of that. I was keeping in mind Morten’s uniform, which had to stay some form of dark blue with red accents, because that’s the Danish uniform of the time and I wanted to keep it. I was also keeping in mind the roles of the characters. Initially, I wanted to stay somewhat true to the original story and keep the color red in Runa’s palette, but it made her look too much like the main character, so I gave it to Verner instead. I liked green on Maia but it is a little too on the nose for a fairy closely related to nature, so I ended up choosing yellow, because I felt it would match her liveliness well.
These colors are my best bet at the moment, but just as I will be improving on the rest of the designs, I will also change them around as I actually put the theory into practice.
The 5 Vignettes
Below are the more developed versions of some of the above sketches. The inking was done with fine ink pens on sketchbook paper. The rest of the coloring process can be seen below. I used a very similar process to the “film still” style from the previous assignment. I did my best to create a fun dynamic with each illustration, and tried to push their poses and expressions in such a way that no background was needed to tell some sort of story.
