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Pinterest board

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/amyadventure1/character-design/

My Pinterest board has a large amount of references, styles and colour schemes which I have incorporated within my final designs. Researching various styles of the 1980′s regarding fashion and appearance has greatly helped me to tie together the character art with the rest of the game. Using Pinterest helps me to organise my thought process a lot, as I do better with large amounts of visuals rather than text to stimulate my own ideas. Using the visual novels ‘The Letter’ and ‘Love, Money, Rock ‘n’ Roll has created a good starting point to adapt the visual novel we wanted to create. Looking into 1980′s horror films and the horror genre has also greatly helped my design process. 

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This is an example of a visual novel, with the anime character style, that is currently still within development. We have been referencing and taking note of other visual novels as to how the process of designing a visual novel works, alongside the time scale. Of course these projects have a much longer development time, for example this visual novel has been in development since September 27th 2016. Working under such a tight deadline of 8 weeks, has pushed our ability to work under pressure and surprised both of us as to how much we can accomplish within such a short space of time. I feel as though this project has been a success due to having a fully functioning game in such a small time space with a lot of growth in regards to plot, character development and the environments. 

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Reference images for Linda changing into ‘Banshee’ type of creature. Focusing on typical horror elements, such as the black eyes, blood and sullen appearance. 

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Possible Cherry Blossom Creek font

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For hair and other areas of detailing such as fabrics, I want to incorporate WLOP’s style of using block shapes and texture to show movement. This method of drawing keeps the painterly style and links to more traditional styles, which I want to incorporate into the visual novel’s character and environment designs. 

Anon, (2018). [image] Available at: https://wlop.deviantart.com/gallery/ [Accessed 10 Apr. 2018].

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Example of 3D being used as a base, then the textures being painted over the top. This is a similar technique to which I want to use for the UV texture maps. Once UV textures are created from the models I aim to recreate a combined style of digital elements with traditional painterly techniques. 

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Started researching into inspiration for the painterly texture for the UV map style I aiming for. 

A main artist of inspiration regarding the actual texture is Thomas Saliot, mainly for the depth of his lighting and shadows. Another artist which I would like to use as a reference whilst painting UV textures would be Lisa Milroy (her 1959 painting shown above and another below). Alongside scripting, looking into these for future reference once we reach the 3D stage has helped me to have a greater understanding of the environment and visual aesthetic. Creating another Pinterest board for inspiration and research of painting textures has also helped me to organise my ideas.  

Examining the use of brush strokes and the variety of textures within a mixture of real and digital paintings is allowing me to understand how I shall create my own. Referencing real paintings and applying them to work digitally is also useful, alongside another aspect that I could practise.

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Need to research more into popularity of urban legends, the psychology of them, how they play on fears and anxieties. 

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Women’s representation on the internet

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Gendered Media: The Influence of Media on Views of Gender

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Feedback from Juan Angel based on the initial character designs, the visual novels genre and inspiration which can be found from other games in the similar art style and genre.  

Juan also gave me a feedback sheet which has encouraged me to develop and experiment a little more with the style. However due to the limited time scale and how I hope to be finalising characters before the 4th of April, I may mainly have to experiment with the poses and facial expressions, rather than completely change the overall art style. Another area to develop is to make sure that the character types are easily recognisable, even though we do not intend to follow stereotypes too drastically as in some areas we intend to challenge them. 

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Juan Angel noticed that my initial character designs style reminded him that of the remastered version of Gabriel Knight, which was originally a 90′s point and click adventure game. This game is a good reference for myself and Carrie to use, since the 3D aspects of the game have such detailed hand painted textures. 

The first two images are from the original 90′s version of the game and the next two are from the more recent remastered version (2014)

Anon, (2018). [image] Available at: http://uk.ign.com/articles/2014/10/24/gabriel-knight-sins-of-the-fathers-20th-anniversary-edition [Accessed 26 Mar. 2018].

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I have received various pieces of feedback from one of my mentors, Ashline Illustrations, discussing how to make sure aspects of the characters fit within the 1980s theme more strongly. This was something I did not focus on as much during the facial practise art since a lot of the era was expressed through the clothes on the inspiration sheets. This has made me realise that minor changes such as adding hair accessories and piercings can make a big difference and add more strength to the design. 

We also went over hair texture and how a lot of the hair had a lot of volume and messy hair was also popular, receiving techniques on how to draw this type of hair has helped me greatly. 

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All initial character concept art pieces, based on inspiration pages created for each character. Drawing variations of each character and using my Pinterest board full of reference images and 1980s fashion trends helped me greatly to quickly sketch and block in the hair. These will also be useful for me to develop the full body versions of each character, as I am now more confident with refining them to make sure they fit within the aesthetic we are aiming for. 

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Aesthetic and visual board for Colorado, as we have decided to use Colorado and Wyoning for our main sources of inspiration for the location. Currently I have created an online thread for people from the two areas to post typical linguistic patterns and phrases they have so we can include these within the script and narrative.