Now that we had applied some research and started to generate ideas through our silhouettes, it was time to work on our ideas and come up with a more refined idea on what our characters would look like.
I had a few motifs that i wanted to try out for my character; goat themed designs, clouds, traditionally ‘sleepy’ imagery like the moon, clouds, pillows and z’s, and facial expressions ranging from malicious and evil to sleepy-looking and relatively unthreatening.
I started off my refinement process by choosing 4 of my silhouettes and creating roughs out of them. I wanted to experiment with a range of ideas i had for these roughs; a moon-shaped piece of hair looming over the top of the character’s head, a goat plushie and some goat imagery on clothes. Some features i noted down were the use of clouds, pajamas being what the character wears and a Z shaped tail; these were all features that i really liked and wanted to carry through to the final design. The roughs i liked the most were the 1st, 2nd and 6th; i felt that the 6th and 1st designs represented sloth the best, while i liked the more wild and non human looking qualities of the 2nd one. After creating my roughs, i came up with 4 refinement designs. All of these designs are quite similar, but i was going for something different with all of them; the first one was the standard design i had in my head and a template for the others, the second one had very long arms and claws to reference an actual literal sloth, along with some animal-foot looking shoes, the third was meant to go down a cuter road, with over sized sleeves, rounded off horns and uneven shoes, and the fourth one was meant to look a bit more monstrous than the rest. There were features i liked from all of these designs, but there wasn’t one i liked a lot more than the rest; in all honesty i had some problems with my design, such as the fact that it didn’t really look like a demon, and that i felt like i wanted to play around with mixing up some of the features a bit. Nonetheless, i needed a character design, so i took it into line art;I wasn’t especially happy with this line art. I still had all of my initial problems in mind, like not really liking how the character looked so human, but i also found working on Photoshop to do line art a bit harder than usual because of the pressure sensitivity. The line art looked a little messy and unbalanced, and i wasn’t sure if sloth would be the first thing people thought of when they saw my design. I decided to re-do it, because i didn’t want to work with a design that i wasn’t happy with. A feature i knew i wanted to keep for sure was the open mouth; not only did it give off the impression of yawning, but it linked to my research of Belphegor, a demon who represents sloth. Belphegor always had a gaping open mouth, and i thought this would be a fun feature to work with in my design. Another feature i wanted to keep was the Z shaped tail, as i thought it was a clever incorporation of the letter Z into her design.I used some features from other refinements to achieve two things; to make my final design look more monster like, and to make it look more like it represented sloth. The changes i made where;
making the horns longer and pointier to give off a more monster like impression
removing the goat plush as it felt a little out of place
covering her eyes with her hair, which i think helped with making her look a bit more unique
sharpening her claws and ears to exaggerate that she was non human
I added a few finishing touches to my design to give it more of an obvious ‘sloth’ look; i was trying to be a bit more nuanced and subtle in my reference to the sin before, but i realized that with character design for games, people need to have an idea of what they’re looking at as soon as they see it; it needs to be obvious what sin it is. I added a pillow, a snot bubble and some Z’s to give her a more obviously sleepy look, and with that, i was finished with my line art.Finally, i asked someone who wasn’t on the project and had no idea what my drawing was for what they thought the character would be like. I wanted to do this because they would answer without any bias, giving me a perception of my character from someone who wasn’t looking at it through the eyes of someone who knew what i was going for. If they never said the character looked sleepy or lazy, i’d know that my design was somewhat unsuccessful. I started by just simply asking what they thought the character would act like, then followed up with a question on which of the sins she’d represent.
I asked one more person, to see things from yet another perspective, and she said the same thing (in the voice notes she said the character looked ‘nonchalant’ and maybe a little rude). I was now confident in my design, and i’m ready to add colour.
For adding colour, i want to work on making the character look a little less human, as i still think she could look a little more monsterly.
