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The Process Behind "Creating Characters"

"Through this workshop, students will learn about the process that professional artists go through when designing characters, and will then use that knowledge to create their own character in an act of creative self-expression.”

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In deciding how to best adapt the process of character design for a classroom setting, I looked at my own experience and how I personally like to approach the design process. After much rumination, I developed the following path for "Creating Characters":

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  1. Research/Gathering Inspiration

  2. Concept Sketching/Drawing Techniques

  3. Storytelling

  4. Concept Development/Mind Mapping

  5. Silhouette and Color Thumbnail Sketching

  6. Preperation for ArtsFest - The Model Sheet

Research/Gathering Inspiration

For the Research/Gathering Inspiration portion of the workshop, we created our own mood boards to represent our personal aesthetics. Mood boards are a collection of images that all come together to convey a certain message or feeling. For this activity, we explored our likes/dislikes in design and used these mood boards as a way to start thinking about design ideas.

(Mood Board by Alyssa Minor)

Concept Sketching/Drawing Techniques

Next, we began drawing in earnest, which meant going over basic sketching techniques as applicable to character design. Some topics included shape language, straight vs. curved lines, and different drawing styles. An example exercise is when the students were asked to draw themselves in a cartoonish style, or a style from a pre-existing show, movie, comic, or video game.

(Drawings by Alana Isaac, Mari Burggraf, and Tavi Steckel).

Storytelling

To reinforce just how important storytelling is to character design, we examined ways in which a character's story can be portrayed in a character's visual design alone. Though, throughout the workshop, all activities had the students creating designs from a story, or a series of prompts. To switch this up, I came to class with three original character designs that I created without a story in mind, and asked the students to break into three teams and come up with stories for these designs as a group. 

(Designs by Kiley Clements, Workshop Leader)

Concept Development/Mind Mapping

In order to begin narrowing down character ideas (including the design AND the backstory), students created "Mind Maps" which were a visualization of their ideas. To avoid limiting their imagination, students were asked to write as much as possible, then decide on ideas after parsing through all available concepts. 

(Mind Map by Laurin Brooks)

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Silhouette and Color Thumbnail Sketching

Following the Mind Mapping activity, the workshop transitioned into putting written ideas onto paper as quick sketches. Thumbnail sketches in particular emphasize drawing a lot of sketches in a short amount of time, thus creating a sense of quantity over quality and generating an uninhibited amount of different designs to explore. It is from these thumbnail sketches that students were to find designs they want to further develop, as opposed to sticking to one from the beginning and ignoring any other possibilities.

(Thumbnails from Ella Herr, Aileen Foley, Emily Schultz, and Maria Ramos)

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Preperation for ArtsFest - The Model Sheet

After finalizing their designs, the students made model sheets of their characters, which can be seen here.

In addition to the model sheets, students also assembled little booklets featuring photos of the various activities they completed over the course of the semester. They also wrote interpretive texts/artist's statements for their work, which can also be found in the link above.

 

The image to the left shows the "Creating Characters" workshop exhibition from ArtsFest on April 30, 2022. 

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