Final Proposal and Current Progress

For my final, I intend to take the character I designed and create a small series of animations with him, which my Thesis team will then (time permitting) implement in our game. It should be noted that some of these will be true animations while others will actually be a single frame that will be 'animated' in the game I'm putting them in. For example, running will be a true animation, with the legs actually moving across multiple frames (and possibly other small effects, like hair and headband movement), while something like swinging or sliding down a wall will likely just be one frame of the character in a certain pose while that frame moves as needed in the game. I may create some examples of what this looks like for my final presentation in this class.

At this moment, I am working on finalizing my character's design. I have consulted my team's lead artist, who redrew my design in his own style to show how it would look if he drew it, and I am in turn taking his redraw and drawing it again myself, with some of my own tweaks and changes, so that the final design should look like a smooth blend of my character design in his art style. Although this final design is not yet complete, I'm putting what I have so far in this blog post. I will be continuing work on the design over Spring break, and will update the blog when it has been completed.

So far, I am quite pleased with how much closer this drawing is looking to my artist's style. I have observed how he draws with his tablet, and did some reading on how artists draw with tablets, and so now I am using multiple layers to create my drawings, which can be seen in the unfinished drawing above. I start with a layer that is essentially a stick-figure skeleton, to make sure my proportions are correct, then create a new layer where I do a rough, sketchy outline of the character. Once it looks like what I had in mind, I do another layer on top of that, where I use a mix of the pen tool and my own hand to redraw the lines smoother and cleaner. After that I create details on a new layer, drawn roughly again to make sure they look the way I want them before going over them in yet another layer.

This method of drawing has allowed me to break my habit of trying to draw all the details in perfectly right from the start, because now it doesn't matter how dark I draw -- I can erase without leaving any smudges behind, and I can adjust opacity on individual layers to lighten my drafting layers before going over them again on new layers. The only problem I have now is trying to keep my lines as smooth as possible, because photoshop doesn't have an automatic line smoothing tool, to my knowledge, but the pen tool is helping with some of that.

Although I will be using my artist's drawings of our protagonist as reference material, and will be consulting him from time to time to make sure I am adhering to the game's aesthetic style, it is important to note that all the drawings I submit will have been drawn by me, and that he is only functioning as a sort of editor or supervisor for my work, not drawing it for me.