Creating the final character - son

The last character I decided to finalize is the main character. I decided to finalize him as the last because I wanted to get a sense coloristically of how do I want this character to stand out and what will be special about him. I needed him to stand out because this is my main character and most of the attention should be on him. However, all of the characters are important in their own way and very special, it is why all of them have interesting designs and interesting color palettes. 

For the sketch, I decided to create a new sketch of the character basing it on an initial sketch I have made and discussed in my initial sketches post. This is the sketch I was basing my new sketch on. 

There were things about this character that I liked and things that I saw as mistakes. A mistake would be for example how flat the trousers of the character are. Generally it seems like the weight of the character is not on any of the legs, it seems as if he was floating or about to collapse. The hair I liked, but I wanted them smaller, so same idea but less. The nose in not the same as anyone's from the family, so I had to change it because he has no one to get this nose after. I liked the freckles and eyes so I decided to leave them. For my sketch I decided to also give him his attribute - the magnifying glass. 

Here is the new sketch I have created: 

 I think this new sketch is a lot more successful because it is more 'tamed' and fits the family more. With the first sketch I went too far with changing the proportions and it would make the character stand out too much when compared to its family.  This character carries the similar features but the style it is drawn in fits the rest of the concept more. I am happy with this. 

The first step was as always tracing the character, looking for any mistakes I have done by accident, for example tangent points, but I did not see any of those. I have also outlined the character without seeing any clear mistakes. 

The next, very important step was choosing the color palette. I did a lot of experimenting with color before establishing the palette itself because I wanted to be sure it fits my character the best that it can. 

First I looked at complementary colors from the color wheel on Procreate. What I think is interesting is that on the color wheel in this software, the purple's complementary color is green, not yellow. 

Here are the pairs of complementary colors I looked at. The software generates a color's complementary color by itself so I knew they were right but I did not quite like this color combinations for my character. I wanted something more 'hip' or fun since this character is indeed a child. Another colors I decided to look at were split complementary colors. 

I took a color wheel found online as a reference and grouped my colors in groups of three. I had two favorite groups and those groups were the one on the top and the one on the very bottom. I had to pick one that I thought would suit this character best. 

I decided to go with the one on the very bottom, because it would make the skin color very dark - like the dad's or even darker. I wanted this character to stand out coloristically and using those colors would make him stand out for sure. Especially the darkness on the face. I knew I would not close the palette with these 3 colors but they were my starting point. 

Eventually I came to the conclusion for my color palette and this is it in its final form:

From this color palette, the blue is only for the magnifying glass. It was not used for the rest of the character. 

Coloring the character was generally a very enjoyable process. I decided to dress the character like children in my target audience dress to make him even more relatable. I decided on putting him in a tracksuit, so a hoodie and sweatpants because these clothes are comfortable and children definitely like wearing those because of their comfortableness. It was my way of making the character closer to kids his age.  

Here is the screenshot of the clothing. I personally think the colors balance the purple skin very well and the character does have a body type like children around 8 years old have. It has a lot of circular shapes and I think they add friendliness and child-like posture to my character. I did not use the curves against straights rule in this design because the character is wearing an oversize hoodie so the bones are not so visible. 

I am generally quite happy with the character and how it turned out. Here is a video showing my work process:

 

As in all of my other character development posts, lastly I was focusing on the name of the character. Here we have a character who is interested in mysteries and riddles, almost like Sherlock Holmes, but I would not name him Sherlock because that would be too obvious, I don't want my names to be obvious because I think it is better when people get them only if they really go deep in depth in the cartoon, exactly like it is with Chowder. I never knew his name was based on some sort of food. 

For this name I thought about the word 'mystery' but in a different language, but it was mostly translated to puzzle related word which I did not like. Only in Esperanto it was acceptable - Enigmo. I kept that on the back of my mind if I did not come up with a better name for my character. 

I looked also at the word 'riddle' and it was also all very similar to the word Enigma and all that which is interesting because enigma was a machine that was coding things for the Germans during the second World War. I think the name Enigmo is actually quite interesting, especially since there were 3 Polish men who broke the Enigma code and saved millions of people. 

Here is my main character - Enigmo.