Visual Development - Characters

For my animation, I need to create two characters. Neither will be on the screen for that long, and I don't want them to be the most memorable part of this animation, so I'm going to go for a very simple character style.

Ctrl Alt Del webcomic

Doritos and Pepsi Max
Nick Morland [The Mill]

I've looked at two webcomics for inspiration - these hold more importance to the content than actual character which is what I'm aiming for, so I decided to experiment with their very simple face styles which is the most important part of the characters within the animation.

I tested out simple shapes and expressions,  drawing too quickly so that I didn't over think the design. I had alreayd planned on using block colors for the characters, because the background was going to be block colors already, and painted characters would be harder and probably wouldn't go with that background as well.

The male character only needed two expressions for the whole animation, neither of them lasting long, so I did a test to make sure that I could get enough variation in expression before moving onto the next design stage.

I found a few color combinations that I liked and then tested them against the two main shades of blue that I would be using in my animation. There were a few combinations that I liked, but I wanted to use the first (ginger) color scheme, or something similar for my siren character, so then I had to choose between the top right and bottom left colors. Though I do like the bright colors of the bottom left, I felt like it would probably be too dark for the rest of the colors in my animation, so I went with the top right one instead.

I got a few very loose design ideas down for the siren before realising that you only saw the bottom half of her face - that meant only her hair and her lips, and only for a few seconds, so I decided on one of the simpler set of lips, and on the hair that looked the most damp - I love the idea of lots of curls for women of the sea, but it makes sense that she lives in the sea, so her hair would be wet and a lot flatter. I used the red hair/pink skin colors at first in the animation, and then changed them slightly to look softer against the blue background and colour of the rock she sat on.