Creating the final character - dad

 The next character I decided to develop was the character of the dad. I have created 3 initial sketches of the character before where I concentrated on wide shoulders and a sharp jawline. There is one main sketch that I really like and I got feedback from my tutor that it was also his favorite sketch. That made me more sure the I want to use the particular sketch. 

This is the sketch I was using. I think it is a very good sketch and it is definitely thought through. The changes I decided to make were really minor, because I was already very happy with this particular character. 

I started by tracing the character with the Peppermint brush. As I said I wanted to make a few changes, and one of them was going to be making the legs a little bit thinner. My inspiration for that move was an already existing character - mr. Bobinsky for 'Coraline'. 

Alexander Bobinsky (2009)

Alexander Bobinsky is a character who does a lot of acrobat tricks and had a big stomach, but his arms and legs are extremely thin. There are clues in the movie that show he has been affected by the Chernobyl radiation. 

I wanted my character to look a lot more stronger than mr. Bobinsky, but I thought that thinning out the legs would be an interesting thing to do, since people who lift always say never to miss a leg day, because then there is a very muscular body on very thin legs. I thought that would only add appeal to my character. 

This is the change I have made and I have also added big boots for my character, almost clown-like, to make that bottom part of the character's body a little bit ridiculous, I think that ridiculousness makes the character interesting, and that was my goal. 

Once again I made sure to use the rule of straights against curves, but here it was to highlight the muscles of the character. 

Here the muscles are a little bit exaggerated and generally exaggeration is desired in character design. Those characters are not realistic by any means, so exaggerating their features will only make them more cartoony and appealing. Working on the appeal of the character is a skill that I am constantly developing. I think, doing the muscles so visible and the legs very thin is a smart action on my part because it makes it all as I said, a little bit odd and out of place. This is what I wanted for the character. 

Next, I encountered an obstacle - a hand. As I mentioned in my previous post, I struggle with making the hands of my characters. It is a little bit different when I am looking at my hand and have a pencil in the other hand and I try to draw realistically a fist or my hand in a different position. Whenever I am working in a specific style, for example - cartoony, it is more difficult, because I not only need to take references from my own hand but also transition it onto the style I am working in. Here I have taken a screenshot of a very unsuccessful sketch of the hand. 

This was a very unsuccessful sketch for a various of reasons, the first reason is, I forgot about the thumb. The second thing is that the idea of perspective is completely lost in this sketch, because the whole arm is tilted to one side and the and is facing the opposite direction. Generally, as I said, this sketch is a mistake, but only doing it made me realize what was wrong with it. 

To fix this mistake I needed to really think about the positioning of the hand and how should the fingers be bent so it looks at least a little bit more real. 

For a reference of this study, I have looked more in depth at my own hand and my fingers and how I create a fist. I have taken a picture of my hand for a starting point to my creation. 

Looking at a real hand and the perspective was definitely very helpful because it helped me establish how should my design look like. 

This is a design I ended up creating. I ma very happy with it and I can see how me looking at my own hand helped me to understand not only the human body but also the perspective. I am really glad I fixed the sketch because now it makes a lot more sense. 

When going over the lines I also looked at some other mistakes I have made while tracing. Here is a mistake, and how I fixed it, when it came to shoes. 

In my initial sketch of the shoes, the heel was flat, which made the whole shoe very two-dimensional. With the darker line, I have created a curve. This curve adds volume to the design and when creating characters or any sort of product for animation, it is important to draw volumes instead of surfaces. Even when it is just a 2D drawing, it needs to at least give the illusion, it is made out of volumes, not just flat areas. 

Another thing, I like to add lines that go the opposite direction. I used this rule when creating the teeth. They do not go naturally, but have a distortion that makes them look more appealing. 

Here, if I made the lines showing the teeth longer, the teeth would collide and that is far from how human's teeth work, but it is used often in character design. Generally making the lines face opposite direction is a very common action, but with this one it is important not to go too far because it would cause the character to be overcomplicated and far from the desired appeal. 

Last step is coloring the character and for that, the color palette is needed. 

I started by creating a color palette for the dad by thinking about what I want the colors to represent. This is a very strong, confident character that needs this power to be also presented in color and I think here using complementary colors would create a great contrast here. I kept in mind that the contrast between purple and yellow is the strongest contrast there is in color because they are not only complementary colors, but there is also a contrast caused by the fact that purple is dark and yellow is light. 

Here I took different shades of purple and its complementary colors to see what options I had and if it is definitely something I want to experiment with. I was generally happy with the contrast, so I created the palette with the colors I wanted to use, and here it is. 

I thought this was a good palette, so I decided to start coloring my character in. It turned out not so good. 

I just thought the yellow was too bright. I wanted it to create contrast, but the contrast turned out to make the character look too much like a clown. I decided to balance the colors more, and make the yellow more of a gold shade, which would also make a lot of sense with this character, because I was thinking of how he is a golden medalist. Definitely changing the color palette helped the character out a lot. 

This is the final palette I decided on:

 

Here the colors are a lot more balanced and they still contrast with each other a lot. I think this palette works a lot better than the one I have created before. 

Here is the entire working process captured in a video:

Lastly, I needed to come up with a name and this was a lot more difficult than I have thought it would be. I want my character to be really strong, so I decided to google who is the strongest person on Earth and apparently that is a man named Lasza from Georgia (country). I did not want to name my character Lasza because I think this character name could be difficult to pronounce for some English-speaking children. I wanted something simpler. I decided to look at the word 'bar' as in the bar in powerlifting and in Polish it is sztanga, which once again is not easy to pronounce. Then I looked at Spanish translation and it was a word mancuernas, which sounds good to me, but it is long and I would rather have a name that would be shorter and more catchy. I decided to look at a French translation and it was a word: haltères, which of course would not be easy to read for someone who does not know any French. I speak French and I know that this word would be pronounced like 'alter' with the letter 'a' being pronounced as it is pronounced in the word 'bat'. I decided that this is an interesting approach to naming the character. The word alter in english means to make a small change which I think fits well a sportsman since people who do sport are working everyday for even a small change in their performance. This is why I decided to make this character's name Alter. 

This is the dad named Alter.