Batu - Timeline Character

I was so excited to do the timeline assignment, I had this idea since last summer even before starting school. I always wanted to do a mongolian pig for a few reasons:

1. Mongolian clothing is absolutely beautiful. For example their deel. The smorgasbord of colours, the designs, the patterns, the shapes (especially their boots!), everything about their attire is just gorgeous.

2. I wanted to attempt to design a character based on a culture rather than just a profession. I loved doing so much visual research as well as cultural research when doing this project. 

3. Pigs can have such a variety of looks especially when they get fat, so I wanted to work with that.

Anyway enough chitchat, meet Batu the mongolian ruler:

This was so much fun to do! The main theme behind this was "literally power hungry". 

The baby one is my favourite, getting that chubby asian baby look was actually pretty difficult and went through several iterations. The most difficult to design was the teenager, sometimes he looked too young and sometimes too old. At one point my teacher told me to try out and design him as the typical lanky awkwardly proportioned teenager but it ruined his silhouette and the gaining fat look. 

For his design I made made sure there were some consistent visual motifs that still managed to change such as the shape of his nose and the design of his belt and shoes. I also intentionally avoided some typical imagery associated with each stage such as diapers and pacifiers for the baby and a cane for the senior so that I relied on the design of the character to tell his age rather than props.

Here are some roughs and other doodads:

Mongolian script is written vertically and looks beautiful. I did attempt to make the name look like it was in mongolian script but it proved too difficult and somewhat hard to read. I based the border on a recurring pattern I saw while researching their culture and clothing.

Here's some patterns that I used. The top is for the hat and the one under it is the belt design for the adult. I don't know why blogger decided to make this dark when uploading, no matter what settings I change before saving.

Rough sketches:

Yes, the teen did have a dirt 'stache but I was told to get rid of it because it made him look older.

A tilted head version that I ended up using.

There's about 5 poses in this drawing.

And here are some very early research and design concepts: