Bailey Bayou

We're whirlwinding through a lot of assignments in character design class lately. Our most recent project was to design a playable character for a Guitar Hero game. The character not only to totally ROCK, but also had to translate well as a character for an animated series.

A lot of really cool ideas had already been taken, so it was a struggle to come up with something original. (Visit http://guitarlords.blogspot.com for some previous student examples).

I wanted to avoid making a character look like a glorified version of myself-- why is that often our default? So I started with two opposites in mind-- this character was going to undoubtably be a different gender and race than my own. Here's what I came up with.

ORIGINAL CONCEPTS:

I'm a little in love with New Orleans, if you couldn't tell.


FINAL PIECES:

So Bailey Bayou, as he came to be, was once an alligator who turned into a human. He found some dude's hat and keytar case and then transformed into a rockstar. Two buddies of his also transformed-- one into a musical instrument and the other into a necktie.

This assignment was tons of fun. I'm also very excited to have my professor submit my design to Harmonix and get professional feedback!

Auto Avalanche

I've already knocked out two assignments for the quarter! For this one, the class was asked to design three contestants and their vehicles for a grand race. The name of my race? Auto Avalanche. The theme? Marathoning across the Arctic Circle.


CONCEPTS:

ORIGINAL INKS: 

REVISIONS + COLOR:

 Not too sure where my inspiration came from. I began with the desire to have an ice road trucker as a racer, and the other two characters came to me later.

Desmond's design was based off one of those goofy 90s full body skiing suits. I'm pretty sure my dad might have owned one?

My goal for Hannah was to make her the most drastically different. Rather than give her a snowboard or a pair of skis, I mused with the idea of a little girl journeying in a motorized Barbie Jeep. There still had to be some snow-based transport connection. So why not have her drawn by husky puppies?

Wish me luck with today's critique!

Character Design & Storyboarding

Another year at SCAD has started! I'm excited to take the core classes of my junior year. Though we have barely begun, I have already picked out my favorite class: Character Design & Storyboarding.

Our first assignment was to design three characters for a video game: a hero, a minion/sidekick, and a final boss. These characters were meant to be very different and easily readable in silhouette.

In class, we did an exercise where we picked a time period, a location, and an animal at random. I ended up with ancient Mongolian nomads and a Tibetan mastiff (a very large, frightening dog).

In my game, "East", an old woman and her grandson set out to rescue one of their baby goats from the tibetan mastiff deity...thing.



CONCEPTS:

FINAL DESIGNS & SILHOUETTES:

This project ended successfully. These three characters translated easily into recognizable silhouettes. And the class thought my final boss was pretty nifty. So that's important too, I suppose.