PR01: Character Design

Cara needs a thug type character in her animation to pursue the main character.

After drawing body type ideas I asked Cara which ones she preferred and she liked the bigger, wide chested ones with simple legs. I created a silhouette on it and placed it beside her character to see if the proportions worked well together and if they needed changing or not. After looking back at my research, I realised that a lot of thuggish, brawn over brain types were at least 50% torso or more - the legs were always she same height or shorter than the chest, and the bigger the difference the more thug-like they looked. We ended up going for the right middle once, as the proportions made him look thuggish enough but it still worked next to the main character - he didn't look too big or too short.

Cara liked the thumb-shaped heads best from my sketchbook so that was the basic shape that I went for for these designs. The hooked nose and double chin definitely makes the character look a lot more 'thuggish'. I like the top and the last ones on the right hand side the most; I think that the head shapes work well with the body and they both have a clear personality. The bottom one looks much meaner and menacing while the top on looks pretty dumb. Cara like the menacing one the most, so I moved on with that.

Next I thought about the specifics of the outfit; Cara wanted to keep it very simple as she had a lot to animate, so a lot of the ideas revolved around the neck and belt area. We wanted to make sure that the stomach was well defined and it didn't look boring. We ended up going for the last one, as the neckline of the vest was just the right size to to balance the outfit along with a longer vest and thicker belt.

I did Cara a really quick back view to make it easier for her to animate.