Sean S- D: Character Design Class 1: Shapes

Today was character design day with Justin. We looked at a number of characters, all from different cartoons, backgrounds and eras, and learned about how basic shapes relate to and make up a certain character.

Circle

Circle: A circle, in the world of character design, is seen as a soft, harmless shape which is used mostly in cartoon and child friendly material. Characters such as Mickey Mouse, Whinney the Pooh and Hello Kitty are all built primarily using circles which portray their friendliness.

Square

Square: A square is a sturdy, strong, fixed shape which usually resembles a muscular or big built character. The Hulk is a good example of a "square" character.

Triangle

Triangle: A triangle represents danger in the character design world, so is mostly used to design evil characters.

Shapes can also be combined to represent a mixture of two types of character. E.g. a sqaure and circle can be mixed to create a big friendly character, while a square and a triangle would make a superhero type character, most Marvel comic characters use this combo.

Things to bear in mind:

- The character doesnt have to literally be a certain shape in order to be rendered a certain type. These shapes are only really used during the character design stage and the majority of pointy ends are smoothed out a bit by the end product.

- A character does NOT fall under these categories based JUST on its shape or form. Looking deeper into a character (its audience, colour and what the character actually is) will reveal its true identity.

We were then given a picture of a character to experiment morphing their body types to something else (e.g a square character to a circle) to see how it changes their appearance and roles. I was given The Hulk

I couldnt find the exact picture that I used in class

The main body was just from blocking out square shapes, the faces were experiments with the different shapes. A chubbier Hulk would be circle while a slimmer Hulk would be more triangle

Tried drawing different Hulks inside eachother to help with morphing.

A more triangular Hulk. This simple body shape change makes him look more primal, agile and cunning as opposed to just pure strength.

More notes

I used Daffy Duck for the next exercise, which was to draw him in a different style. There are various different ways to style to a character, ranging from iconic to realistic. Here are my attempts at drawing Daffy in different styles.