Week 1- Research

Fig. 1

My first task in Character design was to research Vikings hats and create one for a character. I did my research on Viking hats and did some quick sketches which you can see on the left side of ‘Fig. 1.’ When doing the research, I realised that Viking hats in the historian age did not have the typical two horns on a helmet, they just had a helmet. However, there were some Vikings who had horns on their helmets but the horns were longer and curlier.

I decided to take what I know and design a helmet for a villain character. As shown in ‘Fig. 1’ the helmet has only one horn and a broken horn, this is to annotate that this character is well known and has been to several wars and faced a lot of life-threating.

Since I had more time on my hand, I decided to design a hero’s helmet and a side-kick. I made the hero’s helmet friendlier by giving it a less pointy design. And the sidekick a funnier looking design.

Fig. 2

We got introduced into caricature in class, we had to go around the room and draw our classmates. For example, ‘Fig. 2’ is a caricature of me that someone drew. I thought this was inspiring because it gave me more of a character/ made the character intriguing to look at.

Fig. 3

These are all of my sketches of people I drew using the caricature style. I think the drawing on the right was more successful than the others as it had more character within the face. The other two faces on the left were somewhat interesting as I was used to drawing something more realistic. Knowing that it supposed to look caricature I tried bloating the face which was the wrong direction. If I was to improve this, I would change the way I looked at the face. For example, I would look at the features that stood out.

My Character 

Fig. 4

I randomly picked a character by choosing a random paper mixed with other papers.

My number was 17, An Elephant, Ethnic art (African), warrior/ brave. Ancient African plains. Based on a warrior who returns and is crowned and is on the attack.

Since my character was going to be an elephant, I decided to do some little study on elephants and the body.

Fig. 5

I started researching African art. It was interesting as they were mostly all silhouettes and beautiful colourful patterns. Doing my research, I decided to draw some of my ideas on paper. I tried making a human-elephant and playing with silhouettes by detaching them as you can see on the right. These were all quick rough sketches; however, all these gave me some few ideas for next week.