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Turning my character into pixel art:

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Animating my character

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Power-ups

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Different colours/flavours:

Here is my Ice Cream Character recreated into 8 different variations of ice cream flavour, we have: Vanilla, Strawberry, Chocolate, Mint & Chocolate Chip, Bubblegum, Banana, Mango Sorbet, and Rainbow! 

I really enjoyed creating these and it let me see what the character would look like with slight alterations- I think my new favourite is between Bubblegum or Mint & Chocolate Chips. I’m not sure how, or if, I’ll actually use these in game right now but I’m thinking that they could work as power ups? Like each flavour gives you an ability, so when you’re Bubblegum you can blow bubbles and float higher. Maybe as Banana you can throw a banana boomerang at enemies, the same way that the Super Mario games haver power ups that let you tackle the game through unique and new methods. 

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Colouring my favourite design

So i coloured in my favourite design, using the same methods I did to colour in the Bubble Tea character before, I retraced my pencil sketch using photoshop brushes, and had a layer for my outline, and created another layer for the colours. The character on the left was my first design, I wanted to try and make it look like Cornish ice cream, which has this sort of yellow tint to it, but it didn’t work quite how I wanted, I feel it looks a bit fleshy coloured and also it’s too similar to the cone colour.

So I duplicated the outline layer, erased some parts and tried a slightly new design, which you can see on the right. Here I added him holding a flake which is supposed to be like a melee weapon, as well as a scarf (he’s ice cream so I thought he might be cold). I also made this one vanilla white, and think it works much better in contrast to the cone. I am happy with this design, but do want to experiment further with more colours and flavours, like i did with the teas. 

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Sketchbook Ice Cream Character Designs:

As I said before with my ice cream bin inspired design, I wanted a protagonist that was happy, so the facial expression is important to me and I worked on a lot of different smiles. 

My favourite design is the complete character on the left. 

I’m thinking i want the character to melt, and that to tie in to the core gameplay somehow. maybe there’s a time limit, and if you spend too much time in the sun you’ll melt and die T_T

Other designs based on the candy corn from Adventure Time. 

The cone being used as a little hat, similarly to the Narwhal and it’s cone tusk.

Should we be able to see the stick in the characters body, or is that weird?

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More Simple Character Designs

I was struggling on where to start with my character design sketches, so I googled some ice cream images, and opened them on Photoshop and began adding faces and limbs- they’re simple, but I actually really like the results. You can see the original images next to the altered cartoony ones.

I got the idea for this after looking at Cake Bash’s in game art style, everything in that game looks fairly realistic, but the characters faces and limbs look at thought they’ve been drawn on. Example below:

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Using the bin to create a character

My ice cream bin inspired character design. It’s pretty simple, but i’m happy with how it turned out- I didn’t even change much, all I did was add arms, legs and a tongue. Only problem is, this character’s not happy or smiley enough to be the protagonist, so I’m going to work on some other designs!

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Why I changed my mind...

THIS. This is the reason I decided to change my game idea and create an Ice Cream inspired character instead of a Bubble Tea one- I was walking around Norwich and outside of this Gelato shop I noticed the coolest bin I’ve ever seen! I don’t think it’s intentional, but I saw a face in the ice cream and decided that I was going to go home and turn it into a character. 

I was thinking about all of the possibilities of Ice cream characters I could create, from this bin.....

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The History of Ice Cream

Ice cream's origins are known to reach back as far as the second century B.C., although no specific date of origin nor inventor has been undisputably credited with its discovery. We know that Alexander the Great enjoyed snow and ice flavored with honey and nectar. Biblical references also show that King Solomon was fond of iced drinks during harvesting. During the Roman Empire, Nero Claudius Caesar (A.D. 54-86) frequently sent runners into the mountains for snow, which was then flavored with fruits and juices.

Over a thousand years later, Marco Polo returned to Italy from the Far East with a recipe that closely resembled what is now called sherbet. Historians estimate that this recipe evolved into ice cream sometime in the 16th century. England seems to have discovered ice cream at the same time, or perhaps even earlier than the Italians. "Cream Ice," as it was called, appeared regularly at the table of Charles I during the 17th century. France was introduced to similar frozen desserts in 1553 by the Italian Catherine de Medici when she became the wife of Henry II of France. It wasn't until 1660 that ice cream was made available to the general public. The Sicilian Procopio introduced a recipe blending milk, cream, butter and eggs at Café Procope, the first café in Paris.

Mr. Whippy is a generalised trademark commonly used to refer to soft serve ice cream in a cone. The mark has been adopted as the business name of many manufacturers, distributors and sellers of ice cream across the UK, and is often labelled on ice cream vans. 

A look at the variety of ice creams available from most ice cream vans up and down the UK. This is why I wanted to focus on character designs based on Ice Creams rather than Bubble Tea, look at the amount of option it’s opened up for me. 

Baskin Robbins and Ben & Jerry’s are probably two of the most famous ice cream companies in the world, I like the simple iconic colour palette of Baskin Robbins, the pink and blue work well for the brand- however they were recently featured in Stranger Things a show set in the 80s and the logo used back then is far better in my opinion.

This is how their logo use to look, i mean it looks old- but that’s part of the charm, I also like the giant 31, as that’s how many flavours of ice cream they serve. 

Ben and Jerry’s hasn’t been around as long as Baskin Robbins, but in terms of quality it’s just as good! Some of the combinations they do are super unique, and it’s something I’d like to play around with when designing my character. Maybe I’ll have a Phish Food inspired character?

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Changing my project!

After looking into a variety of foods and character designs, I’ve decided I want to create a different character, I feel like Boba Tea limits me a bit and have instead decided that I want to create an ice cream character, so I started looking into some relevant characters designs. 

Lil’ Scoopy was a character initially painted by an artist called Nouar, it was then turned into a 3D toy and re-released in a variety of different colours and flavours. It has a retro sort of 1950s Americana feel to it, which I think is intentional, and reminds me a bit of Cuphead. I really like the eyes as they remind me a lot of the old mascots I’ve been looking into. 

I couldn’t find what this picture was from, but i believe it was a mobile game, I’m not a fan of the ice cream or the cones designs- but I love the little pixelated faces, they have a lot of character to them.

Both of these plushies below were made by Kidrobot as part of their Yummy World Brand, and to me they highlight instantly how creative you can be with Ice cream, one of them is sat in the cone and has a great rainbow colour scheme, the other has been dropped, and it beginning to melt. The cone also looks like a hat here, both of these designs are giving me ideas on different ways in which i can begin tackling Ince Cream Character designs. 

However, out of the two, I much prefer this pink one , I like the detail on the cone, as well as the sprinkles and two tone ice cream. 

This is the Nomwhal Mint Chip Plush created by Tastypeach, it’s a really unique design and again highlights how much you can do with character design with a particular food type- here the idea is that the cone is like a narwhals tusk, so the ice cream is shaped like a narwhal. Really simple cute design idea, and I love that it’s an actual ice cream flavour with appropriate colours. 

Luckily Adventure Time has every type of food as a character, here is their Ice cream character called Dr ice Cream, he’s only in the show a couple of times and is a Doctor in the candy kingdom. I do like the design, but think the body is way too long and skinny. I do like that he’s starting to melt though.

Simple character design, and I like the colours, but I think it could’ve been better when compared against other side character designs from the show.

This idea is similar to the Narwhal, originally this was a little dinosaur toy character, but they’ve cleverly used the shape to create an ice cream variant, the tale works as the cone, and the body becomes the ice cream- I love stuff like this, it’s such a clever way of reimagining something, by making slight alterations, without ever changing the original shape. 

I really like this as a character design, it almost looks as if the ice creams come to life, and it dragging the cone behind it as it walks. Really cute little character and I think it works well as both an ice cream character, and a dinosaur character. These are designer toys created by Unbox Industries. 

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Food Character Designs

Next I’ve decided to look at some food characters from shows and games.

Although not a prominent character, I’ve always been a fan of this candy corn character from Adventure Time, I love the idea of having a face on each segment, it almost looks like it could come apart and be 3 different characters. This is something that I could do with a lolly for one of my characters.

I love all of the bosses in Cuphead, and there are a few food related characters. One that came straight to mind for mev though was the onion, and how it cries and uses its tears to attack the player- again this is the sort of character design and moveset I like to see, as onions make people cry. The design really reminds me of the food in Tom and Jerry. 

Chop Chop Master Onion is a character from Parappa the Rapper, he’s more of a humanoid with an onion head. I don’t really know why he’s an onion though? There might be a reason, but I can’t see it. This is the sort of character design I’m not a fan of as it just seems random, with not as much thought behind it. Good game though. 

Donut Head Homer is from a Halloween episode of the Simpsons when Homer is cursed to become a donut, as donuts are his favourite food, he can’t help but pick at bits and eat the crumbs. I think Homers face works really well on a donut, and love the fact the he eats himself. 

Wattam is a game where you take control of various different little items and work together to unite them all. There are a variety of food characters, and they mostly just look like real food but with simple arms, legs, and a face. I’m not a fan of these designs as they’re not creative enough for me, for example I think they could’ve done so much more with the sushi pictured, why does the salmon bit not have a face like the Adventure Time candy corn? Couldn’t they have done wore with the rice and have the arms and legs look like rice grains? I do appreciate that they wanted to go for a simple and consistent style, but I think it would’ve been better to experiment more with each food for more interesting results. 

Cake Bash, a party game starring an array of desserts does something similar to Wattam, but in my opinion it does it much better. Like Wattam the cakes just look like real food, but they have expressions and arms and legs that look as though they’ve just been scribbled on top of them, it’s simple but gives them a lot more personality. Look at that angry little chocolate cake on the right. Also everything in this game is cake themed, the mini games involve decorating cakes, collecting sprinkles, and fighting on the cafe desk. 

I’ve never been a fan of the art style used in Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the characters and overall animation quality just isn’t there for me. I don’t know, maybe it’s intentional- but something just looks washed out here, when I think of food I think of bright colourful characters and these don’t have that. I appreciate that it is something different, but to me the designs don’t stand out, and it’s not something I want to replicate. 

This was a character I found when researching food mascots, I don’t think it’s actually from anything, I think someone just designed it as a little burger character, but this is way more in line with the sort of look I want to implement in my game, very bright and colourful with lots of energy. This is the complete opposite to Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the colours here are so much more inviting and it has a lot of movement to it, even as a static image. 

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Food Mascots

Continuing my character design research, I decided to look into characters that would more directly influence my own work- starting with food mascots. Food mascots are characters made by companies as part of branding, often to accompany a logo or packaging, and usually it’s a character that relates to what they sell or make. One of the Most famous food mascots is Ronald McDonald, the McDonalds clown. 

But there are a whole gang of McDonalds characters, and I’m going to be discussing Mayor McCheese. Like Ronald McDonald, I find it a little creepy as it’s a guy in a suit, with a giant burger head- but I also kind of love it. Although I’ve never understood characters like this, where they are the product that they’re encouraging you to eat, it’s funny in an unintentional way. I like that the characters all have roles to fill, like this being the mayor, and there being a police officer and burglar as well. It’s overkill, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like it. 

Hostess, the company behind Twinkies and loads of other cake snacks have managed to create a mascot for almost every product they make, again these characters take the form of the very thing they’re promoting you to eat, which is still weird. The most famous of these is probably Twinkie the Kid- and I love this little Twinkie character for a number of reasons, the main being that he’s still a cowboy. I think this was a design decision of the time, as Twinkie the Kid was created in 1971, that’s 5 years after The Good The Bad and The Ugly and when westerns were still very popular. But i like that they haven’t updated him to make it more relevant to todays pop culture. Simple character design, and I like it. 

Percy Pigs are lesser known across the world, but fairly popular across the UK. This is an M&S product, which has gained a lot of popularity over the past few years- they started as sweets but there’s now a whole range of Percy inspired foods and products. I’m not a big fan of Percys design, I mean it’s really just a generic pig, and again its practically telling you to eat it’s babies. 

I much prefer mascots that aren’t based on the product that they are (and are therefore promoting some sort of weird cannibalism), but still relate to the product in other ways. Im a big fan of the Peko mascots, it’s simple but really effective, it’s just a little boy and girl with there tongues poking out, showing that they’re ready for some tasty sweets. I love their designs, and colours used on them against the red background.  

The same can be said for Wendys, the mascot and name match up, and the creator of the chain chose this name from one of his daughters, and she is also who the mascot is based on. I just get positive vibes from the retro looking character and fonts used here, it makes it look authentic. 

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Character Designs I like!

I decided to breakdown and discuss some of my favourite character designs in general, across a variety of different media. 

I’m a big fan of the No More Heroes game franchise, and I’ve always loved the character designs. Travis Touchdown, the protagonist of all 3 games just looks like a cocky idiot, and that’s exactly what he is. The smirky confident grin, the stance, the hair, and the clothes all make him look like a an overly confident idiot. He orders a beam katana from eBay and decides that he wants to become the number 1 assassin in the world- and to do this he has to kill the current top 11. Which he does. 

I really like his look overall, he has a simple colour scheme that makes him stand out, and his personality shines through even in pictures and art work- which is what good character design does. 

The Lich wouldn’t stand out as special in something like World of Warcraft or Skyrim- but he does in contrast to everything else in Adventure Time. Generally the characters in Adventure Time are cute and colourful, with a lot of humour, but when the Lich shows up the show completely changes tone. He is this sickly dead looking thing missing skin around his jaw, with dead eyes. When he shows up he doesn’t joke or mess around, it’s just straight to curses, destruction and evil. I really like his design in contrast to the rest of the shows characters, he looks like evil personified. 

Link from The Legend of Zelda franchise has always been a character design I’ve liked, he’s gone through a lot of alterations over the years, but the green tunic has become a main stay and is iconic across the gaming community. It’s an outfit that shouldn’t work- but it just does, to me it just looks like something a fantasy adventurer character would wear. Again really like the colour scheme for this character, the green, white and brown.  

I’m actually a big fan of all the character designs from Overwatch, but Mercy always stood out to me, the idea of this angelic battlefield medic is brilliant. When you die as another character and in first person you see this this god-like intervention swooping down to resurrect you, it looks special. I really like the mixture of this biblical angelic design crossed with futuristic cyber tech. I can see why some people would find this a boring design as well though. 

Major Marquis Warren from The Hateful Eight is one of the coolest looking cinematic characters ever, in my opinion. Everything about this character is stylish and slick (again, look at them red and yellows), there’s just so many little details and nuances to his character and outfit, like the fact he carries around a fake letter from Abraham Lincoln to help win over racists is just genius. Courtney Hoffman was the costume designer for the movie and has said that she created Jackson’s navy cavalry coat, referencing designs from the Civil War, with her own slight palette flourish: a brilliant marigold lining. “Historically, some of the coats did have that that yellow lining. And if you think back to Quentin’s other films—like Uma Thurman’s character in Kill Bill—he is known for his yellow. So it’s kind of that Tarantino yellow.” One of the movie’s standout visuals arrives when Jackson’s character lifts his arms, revealing the pristine lining in his coat—a flash of colour that Tarantino had visualised in the script, and had to explain to Hoffman.

The Spiderman suit is already one of the coolest iconic super suits ever made, so how do you top that? You add a hoodie and trainers of course! The hood just works so well on the spider suit, and makes the original look inferior in my opinion. There are enough changes here to make this Spiderman stand out on it’s own and feel fresh. I also love the touch of Miles being a graffiti artist and spray painting the spider logo onto his suit, it’s good character development and makes it look handmade. 

Grand Theft Auto 4s Nico Bellic is one of my favourite video game character designs, from the concept art alone you just get so much personality from him, and to me he just looks like a real person. Rockstar games are just on another level when it comes to character designs in my opinion, i find a lot of games that try to push realistic characters and graphics end up making fairly generic looking human 3D models- Rockstar make their characters feel real and fleshed out with complex and well considered designs, outfits, voice actors, and stories. I do think this is the case with Grand Theft Auto V and the Red Dead Redemption games as well- but Nico always stands out to me as a guy trying to do better, but surrounded by a world of crime.

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Character Design Process pt 2:

Once I’d completed the characters outlines for both the straw and the body, I decided to merge them by holding command and clicking on the individual layers to select them, then pressed Command + E to merge. Next I created a new layer called Colour, this layer was underneath the outline meaning I could colour freely without having to worry about drawing over the black outline. 

I then selected the brush type, size and colour I wanted to use. To select a colour I clicked on the white square, next to the black square, at the bottom left of the image below.

Here is my first completed character design. I used a variety of colours and shading on him, as well as some brushes with opacity on to make it look a bit see through, like a real Boba Tea cup. 

I decided I didn’t like the arms, I felt that the character didn’t really need them anyway, and didn’t like where they were positioned. So I removed them all together. I then thought it would be a good idea to see what my character would look like as different flavours. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while and I think could be the way I implement power-ups into my game. I only wanted to change the colour of the tea, but I still wanted to keep my original character- so I duplicated all of the layers, and then merged them together. As you can see, I didn’t merge the duplicated tea and face yet.

This is because I only wanted to change this element of my character, if I’d have merged this along with all of the other layers, and then tried to alter the colour the entire image would’ve changed colour at once, so it’s best to do it separately. 

There are a variety of ways to edit an images colour on Photoshop, but I did it by clicking image at the top of the screen, then adjustments > Hue/Saturation.

When you click on that, it’ll open this window which lets you alter the Hue, Saturation and Lighting of your image through sliding bars, move these back and fourth until you find the colour you were after. Here mine went from a beige colour to green/turquoise as I was trying to look for a melon colour. 

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Character Design Process pt 1:

I started by choosing the brush and size that I felt would best fit my characters look, I wanted a thick cartoonish outline to it- so chose a chunky brush size. I then selected the Hard Round Pressure Size Brush, as that makes the line thicker or thinner depending on the pressure you apply with your pen onto your drawing tablet.

Here you can see the lines that i’ve drawn on for the sides, for the lid of the cup however I decided it would be easier to use the shape tool and draw a circle that I resized to fit closer to my pencil sketch. 

I then duplicated the layer buy right clicking on the original circle shape and selected Duplicate layer from the drop down menu. I erased a lot of the lines from the bottom circle just leaving the round bottom line, I did this so that I could make the cups lid look 3D, all I had to do was add the two lines on the left and right of the lid. 

Once I was happy with the cups shape I moved on to creating the Straw, as you can see from the layers tab on the right hand side, I have 4 layers. The Background layer which has nothing on it, the pencil sketch layer (named 43443), then the Body outline, named Body, and lastly the Straw outline named Straw. The reason I like to draw different parts of my character separated across different layers is because...

I can then easily erase the straws outline where needed without having to worry about erasing the cup at all. If these were one layer, it would’ve been much more difficult to erase the straw where it was needed, I would’ve had to very carefully erase the lines without touching the lid. It’s much easier to work on different layers and separate your lines!