Character Theme Line Up Concept Work

Concept Work

For this assignment I had A LOT of concept work:

A LOT. So for the sake of being concise here are just a few.

BOLIK

First page for Bolik designs. After I drew that portrait of him I was set on his personality.

Still wish I developed him a tad more. He could use a lot more work as I didn't spend as much time developing his design compared to Scraps and Surge. He also had some digital explorations which I forgot to take off the school server. I picked a doberman mostly because they have such a great silhouette and they're one of my favourite dogs, so I just wanted him to look cool haha.

MAGS

First complete drawing of Mags with some rough designs. Pretty much stayed the same in the final. For Mags' design I looked at the Greaser Girl look as well as mechanic female pin up looks. Although my references may suggest it, I didn't want Mags to be sexy, I just referenced the looks of those styles. Her design is more relaxed as her personality is and I wanted a character that was bottom heavy like Aladdin and Korra. Her personality is somewhat based off someone in my year and I even imagine Mags speaking exactly the same way that person does.

Mags' rectangular head is based off a toolbox and her colours are mostly blues because when I think of a mechanic I think of cold metal tools with hints of brown to suggest mess. 

This page is where I thought of a line up composition.

The idea that I had for her was that she had this glove tool that projected holograms of tools that can scale. The glove also had multiple functions such as a flashlight, soldering iron, torch and more but due to my skill level I knew I wouldn't be able to draw that idea effectively. Through the loss of one feature I gained another: the character of Scraps replaced that glove tool! And it ended it up being for the better.

Digital concepts, notes and final poses. I actually took the name Mags from LittleBigPlanet which had a character named Mags...who was a mechanic. I realized just now that they both have blonde hair.

SCRAPS

First page for Scraps. He also didn't have a name until I was compiling the drawings together to hand in. He was "The Multipurpose Assistance Tool Bot" or "Toolbox Bot" for a while. I wanted the robot character to be leg-less, function serving design and emoted without eyes . I tried out on the bottom right adding pupils but it looked weird and didn't really have a function with two pupils and it looked more like a screen. It wasn't until I was posing did I see the necessity for some form of emoting with eyes. I settled with one pupil instead. The top left was the original silhouette I wanted but I decided to sketch some more. The bottom right is a drawing I drew after I made the following page:

I remember hearing an artist from Insomniac Games saying they drew in pen/marker/ink so that they can draw an idea immediately and not waste time refining a rough drawing by erasing. I went with that approach and made as many silhouettes as possible following the criteria I needed which was:

-Round body

-1 big eye

-1 small status light

-Rubber hose arms

Below some of the drawings I wrote in red what I was mostly (but not only) referred to in that specific design. It helped a lot and it felt more like free drawing and allowed me to be loose.

As a robot that had multiple functions, I wanted Scraps' design to be a mix of a bunch of machines and appliances. He is a mix of a lunchbox, tv, fridge, lantern, toolbox, and a few more.

As the comic relief I designed Scraps to be more rounded with a big emphasis on his eye and have rubber hose arms that dangled at the side. To add to the rubber hose inspired design, I also gave him glove like hands akin to old Max Fleischer and Mickey Mouse cartoons. I also can't deny that Wheatley from Portal 2 did have a big influence on Scraps. I wanted his colours to be cold and I came across concept art of Mr. Incredible's car and took the colours from that. I also wanted him blue to have a connection with Mags.

SURGE

Surge was based around the whole idea of "short circuit" and "short temper". I wanted to play around with the idea of that small character with big personality trope. From the beginning I wanted his head to resemble a lightbulb due to story reasons and have a body shape like a NOT or Inverter logic gate.

I always wanted his neck to be tightly constrained by his collar. 

Here's digital explorations. The top row of Surge designs was when I still wanted him to be the same aliens species as Mags but that changed when I drew the second drawing on the bottom row and loved the shape more. His colours were taken from Calvin Candie from Django Unchained because I watched it a few days before I did his design.

Original character line up shape comparison. The majority of it remained the same which was cool to see afterwards.

***

Overall I heavily enjoyed this assignment and I'm still continuing to refine the character designs of each character. As this is an idea that I've had for years and only now have finally created finalized art for it, I'm going to continue working on it throughout the summer and develop more artwork for the story. So stay tuned for that! I will eventually reveal the basic plot in due time, I can't say when but I will. I just want to work on this much more. I hope you enjoyed the work I put into this as much as I did!