So a while back I picked a character and tried him out in several different styles and now I'd like to explain my thinking behind my final decision.
So here are my original character style ideas. The first is a lilo and stitch watercolour and pencil inspired character.
However once I'd painted him in adding pencil colour didn't really improve the design. He still felt a little bit flat and uninspired. Which was unfortunate as I liked this idea and although I got the idea from an animation set in a warm climate with lots of vegetation I felt it would translate nicely to a cityscape in winter.
My nest design is actually based on the work of my best friend Kirsty Oxley, an illustration student at the college.
Kirsty's fond of a watercoloured design with thin black cross-hatching detail. I've always liked seeing her work and thought I'd try it out as well but I can't get my cross-hatching thin enough and my character looks to blocky with his cross hatching. I thought about buying a thinner pen and trying again but I then thought it actually had the wrong kind of feel for this story. Although this works nicely with Kirsty's rustic, slightly scary representation of Tam 'o shanter, it doesn't work with a lighter, modern representation of a story about pigeons. It has a kind of old fashioned feel to it that doesn't fit with my animation.
Now the last I like. It's based on another soft, wintertime story. The snowman.
Now where as when animating the snowman each cell was coloured in separately, my animation shall just have coloured in characters in this style. I like it because it feels soft and light and has a light-hearted feel which would be in-keeping with the rest of the story. I also thought against the other characters he felt the best rounded. His shadows were better and he felt more 3D than the rest of the designs. For a little while I was worried he would disappear under the rostrum but I tried it and I could see him fine and so could Dragon Frame. Which was brilliant because I knew this was the design I wanted to go ahead with.
