Character Design: Week 8 Exercises

This week in our character design lesson Justin spoke the words 'role play' and immediately my head screamed uh oh! thinking we were going to do some acting. But it actually turned out that we were to pretend that we were a group of designers producing character designs for a client which my head much preferred. :)

We were given a sort of brief of characters under the title 'Jetpack Jones' set in the 1940s and we were to do at least two each, even if it ended up with duplicates. I worked alongside Sammy and Lydia, and a bit with Anita until she got changed to form an extra group.
We started by asking ourselves what would make the characters scream 1940s and thought of a sort of Art Deco style to develop from.

I ended up creating designs for Ariana, the beautiful space princess and Boltz, Jetpack Jones' trust medical droid sidekick.

I took a lot of inspiration from the Art Deco movement looking at the art deco lady posters that are popular. I also looked at art deco patterns for accents such as Arianna's head dress, waist buckle and communication device and then looked at 1940s Hollywood actresses for a glamorous feel. Star Wars' Princess Leia was also referred to for her space princess role.

Half way through the lesson Justin changed a quality of Ariana saying that she had a water environment background so I made her accents more shell like. As the client Justin was very happy with this design.

 

For Boltz I looked at 1940s machines and Art Deco structures. Because of his role of scanning for medical problems I decided that being able to hover would be suitable. Justin really liked the shapes and style of him however, when it came to conveying Boltz 'odd' behaviour after an accident he was too symmetrical.