Character design - part one

In this blog post I will present the some sketches I have been working on for the character design. I was inspired by the research on different head shapes and generally different approach to human characters. I want my character to be fairly simple, especially since I will have to create thousands of drawings with the character also I want the message of the animation to be more important than the character. In my recent class development exercise, I was leaning towards one specific design and I decided to work from there to see where I can go with it and what I can achieve with that idea. Generally, I was using the technique I have learned last term for character design, which was using very simple geometrical shapes. I was inspired by Phineas and Ferb characters and how recognizable they are. I looked at head shapes and also distortions that I possibly can make in a character and still have a little human character. 

I made a lot of different sketches last exercise, this time I decided to explore this one design that I really liked lest time. 

I thought this character design and this face has a big flexibility with showing emotions. For example Phineas' face doesn't have that flexibility and since I want to work on my abilities of drawing emotions and exaggerating I need a face design that would allow me to do that. I also completely changed the nose. This is the type of nose I have never drawn in any of my characters. I tend to draw big noses that look fun and comic. This is neither very comic or realistic. It is different and I am like different. Generally the shape of the face is based on a triangle and I got rid of the neck on purpose. When looking at different already existing characters I noticed that some of them lack body parts and it works, even though they are not 100% correct. I got inspired by that to simplify my character even more. 

Next I decided to try to draw different face expressions with this particular character, I decided to look at how I can add emotion to the face and how would it all look. 

I really like what I did here and how I changed one face to have so many expressions. It is very important for an animator to be able to do that and I know that I am far from mastering it, I can see that I'm improving and that is what is important. I like how it all looks so far and I will probably work further with this design. It looks good and different to me, I like that.