Saturday, January 15, 2011

Character Demo

Here's a quick demo I did for my students in Denmark. A few of them wanted to see my process in designing a character from the idea to the finished stage. For the purposes of time I kept it pretty simple and really rough.

1. rough thumbnail 2. cleaner line drawing 3. color

1. I start with doodles, rough shapes, quick sketches to get an idea of the silhouette. They gave me the idea of a boy with glasses holding something. This stage is where I have the most fun and usually do more than one rough but again the demo was quick.

2. Then I copy the rough, scale it up, turn the opacity down and do a cleaner sketch adding all the details. The glasses, the sweater he's wearing, a pipe (to fill with candy) and of course chuck taylors.

3. Once the drawing is done I fill in different elements (the pants, the sweater, his skin, his hair etc) and create clipping mask layers above those elements to add color, textures and shadows etc. These really help with painting gradients and keeping stuff separate in case you want to do variations or need to change something quickly. I keep going from here until it's finished and viola. Pretty simple and rough. You can go as detailed as you like but I like to keep my stuff less rendered... showcasing some of the quirky lines in my work. Any who, just wanted to share it with you all =]

14 comments:

Jez Tuya said...

AWESOME!!!! You always make it look easy :D

spando said...

great to see your process, thanks for sharing!

Juny Chen said...

hey, Willie.
the demo is great. I was wondering if u can demo the way u color? I noticed that u usually keep the big shape of the shadow on the object but still do the forms on small details. the way u keep the stroke works really nice.

Christian Sanhueza said...

So good!!

Tom said...

Awesomeness. I hope you put together a book of your drawings someday soon, that would be fantastic.

Meg Park said...

great tips! I love this little character design :)

Amy said...

neat!!! and very cute character :)

Jason Norton said...

Thanks for sharing! The process is always my favorite part. Wonderful art!

Sandra Brandstätter said...

interesting, thanks for the demo.

Arthur Fong said...

dude... love it bro!

willie real said...

thanks you guys. im constantly developing a process with color. the little guy was a quick concept... i was on the hot seat and felt you can never go wrong with glasses and a pipe =]

the brush pen i use is one you can find at kinokuniya. pretty much any brush pen from that store is great...hair tips.

hi arthur! =]

Dudi said...

very niceeee

Dennis J said...

Hey Willie.

It was a great Demo. And thanks a lot for the teaching during the week. I don't think I got the chance to say goodbye properly.

Cheers

/Dennis

Sandra N. Andersen said...

Aw man, I must have missed this! I was probably bussy drawing.
Well, anyways, was nice to have you as teacher :)