Character Design

Goldilocks Character Design:

As I began the design process of my first character 'Goldilocks' I researched into hairstyles that would adhere to the characters personality traits within the narrative. As Goldilocks is portrayed as a rebellious character within my Animations, I wanted a simple yet effective hairstyle to portray this.

I ended up choosing a non-plaited hairstyle but kept with the 'Golden' locks part of the narrative and opted for a short hairstyle that required minimal effort for the character.

I then managed to narrow mad design process down to three simple designs. I did an outline of the characters without shading them to make sure I had got all of the necessary detail I needed. 

I then shaded them appropriately and went through the stages of picking the character that best suited the storyline I had chosen. I opted for the middle character because she connoted everything I wanted within my narrative, she had a rebellious nature about her and the t-shirt design made her seem very 'dark' and mysterious. I wanted it to come across as though she was a teenager who was misunderstood and I felt as though by picking this design I was going with my original idea to do this.

I then created a turn-around of my character so that when I created my puppet I would know what she looked like from every angle. This allowed me to already have the detail, facial structure and the clothing in mind when I created the armature for the puppet.

The hair on this piece was exactly how I'd envisioned my character to look and I was really happy with the final design process for her.

I then begin to size up the character to create a puppet, I managed to make sure I'd got the measurements correct for the torso, arms and legs whilst also making sure these were the strongest parts of wire as I would be moving them more than any other part of the body.

Once I'd mapped out the measurements, I took the image back into Photoshop and drew the pieces I would need to make a stable puppet. This included the blocks for the hips, shoulders and leg/arm joints.  I found this made the process easier when I came to build my character as I was able to refer back to this sheet and make sure I had all of the equipment to build her prior to doing it.

Bear Character Design:

For the design of my bear character I wanted to create a 'childlike' image to work with and begin experimenting with the design of real life bears. This gave me the insight into the facial structure for the bear and meant I would have the proportions correct as I wanted it to look like a young 'bear'. 

The colour scheme for the bears on my reference images worked really well and I wanted to follow them through to the puppet making process. I felt as though in the set I was then able to contrast the colour of the bear next to Goldilocks which then worked with the rest of the set. 

I then completed the second turnaround for the bear which again enabled me to access what the bear would look like from each angle. This helped more so than the Goldilocks one as I had to prepare the proportions of the bears legs properly as they work different to a 'human' puppet creation. Therefore, when I'd finished the turnaround I began to make the reference material for the puppet to be made from.

This allowed me to measure the lengths of the character and as I'd done finished the reference for Goldilocks first I was able to make sure the height differences between them both were adequate for a human to 'small' bear ratio.

Once again, I then plotted the blocks for the armature onto the reference material which helped when constructing the bear as he needed a lot of padding and heat shrink to make sure he wouldn't fall over due to the weight of him.