Title Sequence: Character Design Part 1

For the design of my animation, I wasn't 100% sure where to start. This lead me to doing some drawings of one of the characters from the comic, Miss America, as an attempt to visualise what she might/might need to look like.

Still not being too sure what direction to take it in, I thought that it could be a good idea to experiment with different styles from cartoons already aimed at the age group I was looking at for this - teenagers.

One of the ones I liked the most from this page was the one on the bottom row, second from the right - drawn in a kind of Adventure Time style, using Fionna's body shape. I think that the characters would look very cute using this style, but unfortunately that isn't the sort of tone that I am after for this title sequence, and the cartoon that would come after that. The top right one works better for action sort of cartoons, so that was a definite maybe.

The second page was for more of the extreme styles that I knew probably wouldn't work, but was worth trying anyway. I do like the Gravity Falls style one - bottom, second from left, but again doesn't really scream 'superhero'. The Bruce Timm style one, top second from right would automatically imply a superhero series, but I am not a fan of the sexist body shapes and lack of variety for female characters, whereas there are at least 3 different shapes used for male characters in his style. 

I decided next to look further at male characters, to see if deciding a style for them would translate easily enough for a female character.

The first two are again Bruce Timm style, and though I think that they look good for these characters, I do not want to do that at the expense of interesting female styles. The furthest right one is one that I like - much more realistic, which means that variety in female body shape would be easier as well, but they would definitely take longer to animate, so that was just a maybe until I could decide properly.

The Adventure time style in the top middle is again cute, but not really relevant for this type of animation. The one to the right is too exaggerated though, taking influence from the Hulk character on Earth's Mightiest Heroes, and again it is a style that would make all female characters look too much the same.

The style on the bottom right from Motorcity actually looks quite good, so I thought it would be interesting to experiment with that further on the male characters.

I can obviously get different enough body shapes for each of the male characters, so it is a style that is definitely tempting to use.

With this style, it is easier to get different female shapes just by changing curves to angles etc, but the design on the far left looks much better I think than the one in the center, and the one to the right that is a mix of them both.I don't want to have one character looking miles better than the other, but then I also don't want to be tempted to make both characters look the same instead.

At this point, I thought it might be good to look at another few styles and see what solutions I could get - shown in Part 2 of this blog post.