I See Faces - 60 Characters

This is my list of things that amuse me, frustrate me and interest me which triggered most of my ideas for the characters I have created below. Character design isn't one of my strengths so I tried my best to give each drawing a personality rather than just doing a drawing of someone or something. 

This was my first approach to the issue of wifi that doesn't work. I think it expresses the anger and frustration well but I don't want all my characters to be based on humans so I moved on to actually making the wifi itself into a character which I think has a lot more meaning behind it. 

These sketches are showing a bad hair day and the anger and frustration it causes. The bottom three drawings were created using black cotton and pencil - I think the cotton gives the character a unique twist and it would be an interesting material to experiment animating with. 

Bad hair day

I like the simplicity of these characters and how tartan is the main thing used to make them colourful and interesting. However, although these people all fit to the theme of tartan, I don't see them actually having any personality that I can try to show through my illustrations. 

Dogs and dog lovers

I initially started drawing dog lovers, I particularly like the person in the top right because she looks like a fanatic. However, when moving on to drawing dogs, I picked up on the white dog with black ears and thought this was a really simple way of drawing this animal that I could develop into a character that would be quite simple to draw in different positions and expressions and stay recognisable.  

I think this was the stage where I was getting used to creating characters, I feel I could have carried on with these biscuit characters and really pushed the stereotypes that are linked with different varieties and brands. I think I started to do this with the jammy dodgers by trying to turn this into a flirtatious female. 

This is one of the simple things in life that makes me smile. I think this is a really good basis for some character development because the faces already have an expression which gives you an insight into the character that can be created with them. I particularly like the pepper and the bowling balls because they have the most options for movement. 

There are more character ideas in my sketchbook but for the next stage of development I am particularly excited about experimenting with small dog character and the pepper with a shocked/angry face. 

Facial Expressions Handout

This handout has been useful to me in the first stages of designing some characters because I am not great with thinking of facial expressions without looking at reference material. I think this is something I will get better at with practice and this handout definitely gives me a logical way to think about the movement of the face in relation to different emotions.