Character design Briefs

I chose this monthly character design competition because I enjoy creating character designs. I like the themes that they choose, however I have found it difficult to commit to creating the designs for the competition because I have been prioritising other projects which isn't good. I also feel a lot of pressure because it is a public submission platform that uses facebook.

One month was the Maori Warrior brief. I decided to create a mind map of what ideas came to mind. I then created a moodboard that consisted of a lot of images of classic Maori images. I also did some history research of what the men and women would wear.

Because the women had tattoos on their chins to show dominence and strength, I decided to sketch a quick image of a woman. I ended up not developing this character further because I found the theme too limited and from looking at other submissions, I felt quite discouraged because of how professional and good they were.

Game of Thrones.

Even though I'm not a big fan of Game of Thrones, I thought that I would push myself and create a character design. After looking at other peoples submissions, I decided to recreate a character called Tyrion Lannister. He was the only character I was sort of familiar with.

I used this image as reference because the shadows in his face are interesting and I wanted to create a grey scale image as I have never done this before.

I did an initial quick sketch of him. Even though his mouth is a little off, I decided to still go ahead with the design. I made his eyes a little bigger and exaggerated the shadows. I really liked the sketchiness to the image so I decided to draw it digitally using a pencil brush in Photoshop.

This is my final image. I didn't really develop it as much as I wanted to, I would have liked to add a little bit more detail, and maybe make him a bit more cartoon-like. I enjoyed using grey scale for the character as I have never done that before. I still feel quite discouraged because I find it difficult to create professional looking images because I'm quite a shaky person, so hard lines are difficult for me to achieve. 

I definitely will submit to this competition in the future as I feel it is good practice, but I will try my best to put more effort into my drawings so I can finally feel comfortable with my drawings and not worry about other people.