Anyway, the first project my class got was to design a character with a message as complex or silly as you wanted. When I first get asked to design or do anything I tend to think about context. Is it a game, movie, comic, cartoon or tv show? I'm on a games design course, so one of those mediums is an obvious choice (should I tell you and make this sentence pointless?)
I think a lot about genre and setting, how does the world look and how should things around it look? Colourful, dull and gritty (next gen-ish), realistic or cartoony? I also think about the character's personality and history, perhaps even how they relate to the world and how they see it. Then I think about abilities, powers and all that fun stuff. Then the actual art comes and I draw concepts, sometimes a lot, sometimes one or two. Most of the time I'll stop when I find a design I like rather than push it further and experiment more. It's a flaw I'll rectify eventually, but I think it's a waste of time to go past a design that works to find a few more that don't. I'll only ever change something if people think it doesn't work or looks stupid.
Anyway, for this project I did absolutely none of the above. Which is probably why you're thinking "What was the point of that then?" Well, because you've been fooled. Ha ha ha. Moving on, it's not that I didn't do it, I just did it out of order (so out of order that I may have skipped parts completely). Inspired by freaky things like cirque du soleil, movies like The Prestige and The Illusionist and other little things like a dance or Donnie Darko (it's a movie, but what the hell), I decided to come up with a character based on an idea. Later I would work around that to create a concept and possibly a game idea.
The idea was to create a rabbit who wanted to take vengeance on magicians (and humanity - or anything that hurts rabbits) who killed rabbits during their magic shows. It was a homage or memorial for rabbits that died in the hands or careless, incompetent or cruel magicians. I wanted this rabbit to take revenge in an ironic (situational) way by using magic tricks to cause pain. The rabbit was to be playful, sadistic and distrustful.
My first few concepts were basically thumbnail images I did to create a scene and personality. The first concept was the rabbit pulling a magician out of a hat, the second had the rabbit looking very crazy and evil, the third was a joint magic trick in which the rabbit(s) would crush the magician in a little cage and the last was a rabbit sawing a man in half.
After drawing those, I decided that he didn't look much like a rabbit, but that was fine since I was going to do a few drawings to get into the look and perhaps the style.
Around that time, I was messing with his clothes and actual look as well.
The name for these particular set of pictures happened to be Karma Rabbit, which is another theme I was looking at when drawing these. Eventually, I came up with a name and look I liked. The Rabbit's name is Domitius, which means "had been tamed" or... something along those lines. It was perfect, because it sort of told you what you needed to know. This rabbit had been tamed, but now he isn't.
Then finally came the quote or message. You can read what it says easily, but in the top corner of the picture is something else which reads "Die, v.: To suddenly stop sinning", which is the title I gave my picture (and the project).
So there it is, was that as boring for you as it was for me? Maybe, I don't expect many people to read this (or care). When was the last time you remember someone asking you to read their blog and you did it? I certainly don't remember, so I can't expect much else. This bitterness of blogging will definitely be edited out by the time anyone important reads it. Would you believe that I'm being shoe-horned into a social networking site as well? God, I prided myself on rejecting faceblab and mylifesucks, but you can't win them all, right?
Hallo Kaile! Good to see everyone is starting to get their blog diarys in order. Digging the look of yours, I like how you swapped around the blog entries and "gadgets", sets it apart a little bit. I also like how you have interspersed alot of your rough sketches into the mix, I may have to follow suit in later blog articles in order to meet the "visually rich" criteria.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I said during the projects development that I quite liked the more rabbit-like less humanoid sketches, but having seen the final character, I think it was actually a wise choice going for the more human features, as a truly rabbit like head could not have put across the same personality and expression the final Domitius does. Plus, the final image came out very clean and "neat" thanks to the vibrant lighting.
I love the concept itself, a very clever place to go in order to represent the glorious irony of poetic justice and karma, and after your presentation, (and maybe this is just me) I could really picture Domitius' colourful universe as the perfect setting for a black-humor driven OTT pure action title that could sit alongside DMC, Bayonetta and Godhand. The iconography and recognisable aspects of magic and magicians would provide a very cohesive design and art direction for such a game, and there would be loads of possibilities in terms of moves and settings. A magicians hats full of meat grinders for example? :P
Finally, you write a mean blog entry my man, I was worried mine were going to be too long, so am happy to see we both have alot to say. And that some else had a nice "profound" quote for their character lol. Also cudo's on mixing in a little humour for those of us who aren't holding marker pens and an assessment sheet, I've never seen you write anything like this before so it was very interesting. Particuarly love your closing statement.
Looking forward to later projects!
-Steve