Extended Design: Cy and Dusk's Turnaround and Expression Sheets

Creating the main characters turnaround was quite difficult with both the hair and the headband, I wanted to make sure that the key poses of the turnaround were strong but were correct with what parts of the body were shown. This leads me to the 3/4 pose of Cy, the main character. I found this pose the most difficult purely for the headband and what part of the bag would be seen. After drawing both of these elements and moving them behind the character, I came to the conclusion that neither of these would be seen. Even though this was correct with the perspective, I still felt that I needed to show at least part of the bag to connect with the profile stance. I subsequently considered making the bag bigger however not only would this become more difficult with the animation, it just didn't work with the size of the character unless I purposely made the bag extremely big, to the point where it was bigger than the character. This would work with a different shaped bag, more like a camping bag, but for my character I felt that this approach would not be successful.

I decided to redraw my previous shadow shape for Dusk, I really liked the original long and angular yet contoured body however when I started to redraw him I automatically draw a circular head, and I quite liked this. It was more simple but it worked well for not only the design, the audience as well. The use of a circle shape for the head helps the shadows character as if we were to characterise a circle we would most likely associate it with a kind and soft demeanor in comparison with a square - the angles referring to temper/anger. Having this circle reassured me with Dusk's character it helped me to ensure that Dusk's personality wouldn't be taken as a villain or too evil, I wanted his character to be childish and mischievous.

I then went to drawing the expressions of my character, which I loved. I enjoyed making the expressions myself as reference and exaggerating them to work with the shape of the characters face. I also used influences from characters such as Darwin - The Amazing World of Gumball, Norman - Paranorman, Eddie - Eddie of the Realms Eternal. These expressions were fantastic with the exaggeration of the mouths, eyes and face shapes, Darwin's expression sheet was more helpful towards Dusk's expressions as the eyes were quite similar and both didn't have a nose so the eyes and mouth needed to be even more emphasised. I enjoyed drawing Cy's expressions more solely for the amount of elements that could be exaggerated, such as the nose, the jaw/facial shape and the eyebrows. A good example can be seen in the frowning/'unamused' face in the middle row on the expression sheet. I purposely squished his face slightly and narrowed his eyes, drawing in all his facial features slightly closer to enhance this emotion.

The Amazing World of Gumball

Paranorman

Eddie of the Realms Eternal

Additionally - since the last crit, I changed my main character design with the colour of the outfit from green to red hues. I changed this factor as my feedback for the green outfit, reminded people of Peter Pan and Robin Hood. These elements didn’t matter as such, as these characters kind of worked with his personality, apart from the green being so bright as well as his skin, which slightly clashed. Therefore I changed the hue to a red; in my opinion red is a colour that signifies the main character, which is why I immediately made the headband red. Making the top red as well actually worked successfully. I really liked how it worked with the headband. I did miss the contrast between the previous green top and red headband as it made the spectator immediately focus on the characters face.