CDDA - Facial expression board

Today I finished my characters facial expression board. I did happy, suspicious, laughing, angry and neutral. I'm not hugely happy with the suspicious face or the neutral but I'm pretty pleased with the other 3. Considering that faces are my least confident area of human anatomy I think I did okay. If I finish my environment beauty shot early then I will most likely come back to this and redo those two faces as I feel they are the worst work I have done for my final hand in and I'm not completely happy with them. 

CDDA - Character Beauty Shot

Today I finished my character beauty shot. I'm pretty happy with how it came out, especially the face. I've always found faces to be something very difficult to draw so drawing one with lighting from below was very difficult for me yet I managed well. One thing I would have liked to do better was push the contrast more, particularly the light areas. Whilst I tried this, I do not have long before my deadline so I don't have time to be doing 'perfect' pictures, yet I tried hard and took my time on this. 

CDDA - Turnaround Colour

This week I finished off the colour on my front view for my turnaround board. I've been informed that this is the only view which I need to do on this piece of work. I would have like to have done the others but deadlines are looming and I still have more work to do for next week. Overall I'm happy with how he came out except for his nose, I would have liked to make this a little wider and fatter. Apart from that I'm very happy with it. 

CDDA - Character Pose

After contemplating my previous poses and taking into account my friends opinions and criticisms on them I decided to choose the top left of my three poses but wanted to make some changes. My friends said that you couldn't see enough of him (my character)  in the pose as a lot of him was in shadow. I decided to turn the camera on the same pose a bit and change his stance a little. From here you see more of the blacksmith and less is in shadow. Whilst I like this I still want lots of contrast in the pose to make it interesting. Much of my character is still in shadow whilst others are brightly lit by the brazier nearby. I also would need to sort out the anvil slightly as I originally drew my character too tall and had to shorten the whole image. Next I will try to get a basic colour scheme of what the image will have.

CDDA - Character beauty shot pose work

I just finished off a few pose ideas for my final character image. Whilst basic and messy I think they show values and poses of them quite well and get the general gist of the idea across. At the moment I don't know which one I would like to take forward and plan to think on it a bit more. I also have some friends who I plan to show the work and have them give me opinions and critiques on them.

CDDA - Back character view and turnaround board

Today I finished the back view of my character and in doing so finished my turnaround board for him. The back view was interesting, I can't remember ever really drawing someone from the back before so I had a bit to learn. Overall I'm happy how it came out though, he still looks like the same character. 

My turnaround board came out really well in my opinion. It's all to scale and everything seems correct between the pictures. I think this piece of work will really help when it comes to the creation of my beauty shots of the character. The next piece of work I plan to do is some character texture experimentation's, just to practice underlying photos and make sure I do the best I can on my final work.  

CDDA - Character texture reference/underlay

Today I referenced some images to use in my character beauty shot. These would be used under the colour of my choice to enhance it and make it more 3D, less flat. I got brown leather for the apron, gold for the boots, I got wool for the shirt but in the wrong colour so I will either change this in Photoshop or find more pictures, human skin though I would probably darken this slightly and black wool/black leather for the trousers. 

CDDA - Character side view

Today I have made more progress with my character turnaround board by completing the side view. It took me longer than the front view for a few reasons. I'm not so comfortable with human anatomy from this angle as it isn't generally an angle you would draw a character at apart from for technical sketches so I had to research into the human body and warp it to fit my Dwarf. Also I found the arm and hand hard to get right. Being to scale with my other picture, the arm has to be at the same angle which just so happens to make it seem very foreshortened which was awkward but doable in the end. Also hands are just hard. 

CDDA Colour Schemes

Today I worked on some colour schemes for my character using colour charts and different kinds of colour schemes. First I researched a few different colour schemes but the ones I decided to try and use were analogous colours and complementary colours. My first style was analogous colours using orange to yellow. I started here because I have always envisioned the apron as being a shade of brown and figured I should start there. I like the apron, boots and trousers but the shirt is horrible and I feel the trousers and apron are a little too similar colours. 

Next I tried another set of complementary colours, green and purple. I chose these because I thought purple could work well for the shirt or trousers and green could be a possible choice for the apron. Sadly they came out badly and won't be considered. The boots I tried a gradient effect on the scales which I thought was interesting and considers further thought. 

I then tried a pair of analogous colours with the apron and shirt matching up, red and orange (brown), and the trousers and boots, blue-green and blue. This was more effective than any of my previous designs despite not being great colours. I liked the mix of colours, thinking that it makes the image more interesting to the eye. I also quite liked the red of the apron though think that it should be on a different part of clothing.

Next I tried a pair of complementary colours. The shirt and boots, purple and yellow, and apron and boots, orange (brown) and blue - green. This was interesting and the colours seemed to fit quite well.

This colour scheme was a mistake. It features complementary colours between the boots and both the apron and the trousers and then analogous colours between the boots and the apron. This happened by accident when I got a little confused with the colour wheel and I don't like the result at all.

On my chosen colour scheme I used a set of analogous colours, yellow, red and orange. This was surprising to me as I really liked the combinations of complementary colours in my previous images but this combination really works for me. It has the brown in the apron which I wanted, the red which I like in the shirt, dark trousers and the golden boots. The colour scheme is simple but then the character is only a blacksmith working for a race under siege, he is not a rich man with a large choice of wardrobe. I really like this design and learned a lot about coming up with colour schemes for objects which will doubtlessly help me again in the future.  

CDDA - Character Front

Today I finished the front view of my character for the turnaround board. I corrected a number of issues I didn't like on my previous drawing of him. I made him a bit shorter and wider, more Dwarf shaped I suppose. I also slightly changed the shape of his nose though it isn't very noticeable. Overall I'm pretty happy with this but I'm not fond of his arms though I don't know why. My favourite parts of the image are his hair and his boots. The boots came out nicely on a front view and the hair looks good in black and white. 

CDDA - Character Face/Hair

Today I did some work regarding my characters face. Not having a lot of experience with drawing faces, this is the area of my character I am most worried about getting correct and so I want to know exactly what I am creating before I start work on it. I already had some ideas as to what I wanted beforehand regarding his face, I wanted a quite hard and square face, and I wanted facial hair which was to be brown, red or a blend of them. First I decided to create a basic profile of his face to work off of. This was quite easy surprisingly, only really needing to use references regarding nose and eyes. I made the face quite square and hard with a large nose. 

I then took this face and made very rough sketches showing hairstyles that I consider to be 'Dwarfish'. It was my 7th design that I liked most (Larger, at the bottom). It is swept back hair which is kept under control using some kind of metal hair band loop. The facial hair is thick but short. I think this suits my character well, being a blacksmith where hair that gets in the way could be a danger.

CDDA - Character costume

Yesterday I finished off creating a history for my character, giving me an idea of what and who he is. My starting point is that he is a smith, not in the best of places, at war with the Elves and is among others of his race. With these ideas (and others in the history) I had started getting an idea of what he would look like. I decided to start off by coming up with clothing first. I was quite happy with the ideas I came up to start with. My initial sketch of a top seemed too much of an unnecessary piece of clothing, something a poor community at war would not use. I redesigned it as something similar to an apron, something with functionality and purpose. I wanted to give him some sleeves as well so I gave him an undershirt too. Boots wise I wanted something heavy and quite elaborate as a smith would need hard boots anyway so they may as well be nice! I came up with boots that have layers on them which I though looked good. I then came up with a rough design for his hammer as every smith would need one.

Next I decided to stay with the same design and try to take it forward, give it more of a finished look. I gave the apron a belt to keep it tight to the body, keeping it out of the way of my characters work. I also added pockets onto the legs and the chest for tools to sit in. I decided to make trousers and shirt out of the same material, something light like cotton so that it would be breathable. The apron was also extended to cover the top of Dwarfs legs, stopping burns. I kept the same boot design as originally drawn. I then drew the costume in a pose that would be commonly seen in a smithy. I quite like how it sits on a worker but would like to add something to the upper apron but I do not know yet. Once I am happy with the apron I will probably start to work on faces and facial hair. 

CDDA - Dwarf inital sketches

After the completion of my mindmap I tried to imagine what my different races would look like and what they do and try to achieve as a race. I found it difficult to get a feel for any less intellectual creatures like giants which narrowed down my choices to vikings, gnomes, dwarfs and elfs. I decided on choosing the dwarfs above the others as they have always interested me in games and novels, often being shown as brash or cold which I felt did not capture my idea of a dwarf. Before looking into research I did some sketches from my ideas of what a dwarf is, trying to get proportions and build accurate mainly. 

CDDA - Character mindmap

I started work on creating and choosing a character that I would have to make a character model sheet of yesterday. Immediately I knew that I wanted to work within a fantasy world with mystical beings as that is something I love the idea of. But what I could not decide was what kind of character should mine be as I did not want to create this world and then create a human. To organise my thoughts I started work by creating a mindmap of all the creatures and people that inhabit this fantasy world and then started putting down details of what they would be, would have or would use. Some characters I could start picturing in my head whilst others did not appeal to my imagination. From this I can start working on choosing my characters race at least.

CDDA - Chess characters task

 We were set the task of coming up with 3 characters based around the theme of chess. I decided that one force would be of humans that consisted of warriors and wizards whilst the other army was led by demons and creatures controlled by them. My human is a bishop, the giant is a castle and the zombie demon is a pawn.