Proportions - class task

In class we looked at human proportions and designing a character. This was a part of our skills development. I generally see the skill of drawing a character as very important in my progression route. Character design is something I am highly interested in and I want to be really good at it. What we did first was create a sketch of a human in the right proportions. 

Here is my human sketch:

Generally human is as tall as their 8 heads (man) and around 7.5 heads for a woman. And this is something very important to remember when drawing. When looking back at my drawing I would say that I have stretched the posture horizontally too much, by that I mean that I have made the legs too thick for their length. This is something to look out for in my future drawings. I also thinks the hips are not vide enough compared to the rest of the body. As I said this is still something I am learning and I am fully aware that I make mistakes, but exercises like that help me develop and see the mistakes I have made. 

What we did next was create a sketch of a character, where those proportions would be changed a little bit to bring focus to some of their traits more. I decided not to make a big head because that is something I do very often. I wanted to challenge myself and make a character tat looks more serious and strong. 

Basing on the line of action (the line that goes from the feet to the head to establish the character's pose) I have created this character and I am actually very happy with how I approached this. I think I remembered correctly not to draw flat surfaces but something that has a volume and to base everything on circular shapes. I have widened the shoulders and made the legs longer to show this person's strength and how big they are. I put the character in a pose where he is saluting, the only thing I could change is the width of the hips because they look too thin, I made them this thin because os the perspective, but now looking back I believe that they should be a little bit thicker. 

Next I decided to try to do a different pose of the same character to challenge myself even more. I decided on a dancing soldier. I needed to think the pose through a lot more than the saluting one and remember about the proportions I have established. 

I have started by creating a line of action slightly bended and I have placed my character on the line. I used many lines to make sure my character has a volume and is not a flat surface, I have not taken a picture of this particular step in the process. After creating a basic shape I have added some clothes on him and started to override the main lines with the ink pen. 

This is how it started coming along. At this stage I wish I added more wrinkles and volume to the clothing itself, because it looks like the shirt and the pants are literally glued to the human, it is not supposed to look this way. 

Here is my work when I finished the inking, but it is before I got rid of the pencil lines. 

When I finished inking, I decided to add color. I chose to use markers, because I use markers very rarely and I would like to feel more comfortable using them. I decided to use markers: 2 shades of green, gray, yellow, brown and black. I decided to use yellow for skin, and black to make some lines of the character stronger. 

For the shirt I wanted to make a moro pattern, which is mixed greens overlapping. I was not sure how to get that effect, therefore I starting to add stripes of the two colors in random order and in random places. 

This is how the character looked like after I erased the lines and I have started creating the moro pattern. It took me some time to to cover the entire shirt in this pattern, but I think it was a good method to approach creating moro. I believe that it would look even better, if I owned more shades of green in markers. 

I decided to color the pants gray, the belt brown and the skin yellow. I wanted this character to look like a real soldier. 

This is my finished character. I am very happy with how the moro pattern came out because I think it is done very successfully. I feel like the colors work very well together, especially using the contrast with the light colors on the top of the character's body and dark colors below waist. I think the contrast makes the character more interesting. 

A character that already exist that I decided to look at is Johnny Bravo. I think Johnny Bravo is a very well known character and it is considered "a macho". 

Johnny Bravo 

Since I wanted my character to be somewhat muscular and have those shoulders and arm muscles bigger than normal, I decided to look at a character that really takes those proportions to extremes. Johnny Bravo is so popular because of his very simple structure and his big arms and big hair. When I say 'simple structure', I mean that the appearance of the character is not very complex. There are some straight lines and curvy lines against each other. Generally placing straight lines against curves is used to create the illusion of bones and muscles and that can be observed in the Johnny's hand that he keeps up. However, Bravo's structure is very 'slimy' by that I mean his body looks like liquid, it looks as if there were no bones and no spine. This makes the character interesting but less realistic. 

I wanted my character to have more human proportions, because I tend to make my characters' proportions highly modified and I wanted to try something new and see how it looks like. Generally looking at the soldier I have created I think it is a nice-looking character, but if I modified the proportions more, it would be even more interesting. 

This exercise is strictly connected to my set project, because I am designing characters. It made me realize that modifying proportions is good because it makes the character get more attention from people, for instance if I look at Johnny Bravo and at my soldier, I am more interested in Johnny Bravo, even though he is waring just a plain shirt and there are not many colors. It shows that less is more and making the character more complex does not make it more interesting. 

I have been designing characters for a while and I usually go with my intuition on how to approach proportions, but this exercise made me think about them more. It made me see the possibilities of enlarging and stretching body parts to bring attention to particular trait of a character, for instance I wanted a strong soldier, therefore I enlarged the shoulders. If I wanted a character that would immediately look very smart, I would probably give them a large head to bring attention to their brain. 

I think this task made me realize a lot of things about character design and that it is very useful when creating well-thought characters for my project.