Digital Reflection 11 - Group project - Silhouettes and Sketches

I started with the character concept, in particular producing silhouettes to rapidly generate ideas. I played around with the idea of having a courtesan town character as well as a more formally dressed character, using both elements of male and female western clothing such as chaps and suit ties, mixed with dresses and decorated hats.  From my research I noticed that female wild west dresses from the 19th century feature puffed areas of skirting around the hips, which an narrow down further towards the feet. This made for some interesting designs, and allowed me to experiment greatly using sharp shape language.

I also added accessories such as bandoliers to give her more of a gang-leader aesthetic, which produced an exciting clash with the extravagance of some of her formal wear. At the same time I experimented with stances to illustrate her as a threatening and capable leader, yet elegant leader.

Next, I produced a sheet to determine the character's body type, ear shape and facial scars in more detail. Stereotypically I found that elves in high fantasy are portrayed as tall and slim. I used my character reference sheets as well as the team moodboard to combine these features with a type of stylisation. I looked at games such as We Happy Few and Dishonored whilst making the different silhouettes, and ended up with a sharp edged, tall and slim figure. I thought that the pointed edges to her body acted as useful shape language to represent her personality and character traits from a glance; hard, malicious and haughty. 

I continued experimenting with the shape of her ears, thinking about the shape language of the body. I wanted the ears to be longer as this matched the type of extravagance that the character has in my clothing silhouettes. In addition, the pointed shape of the ear adds to the effective shape language that I produced for the body.

Finally on the same sheet I considered different facial scars that could add more narrative to the character and her backstory. I decided on a curved scar as I liked how it contrasted against the sharpness of all the other shapes of the character. The final choices were combined into one neatened sketch of the character's body, so that I would have a strong base to work on when adding the clothes.