Final

Final - Character ready to be played

Styleguide

Analysis - Styleguide based on reference style

Design-1

Design process - Poses & proportions

Design-2

Design process - Combining iterations into final sketch

Design-3

Design process - Iterating through colour schemes

Design-4

Design process - Final colour & Shading

Modelsheet

Design process - Character modelsheet

Everard 'Snappa' Cairot
Designing a 2D game character

Intent

Goal

Software

Improve artistic skills, gain experience with artistic workflows

A 2D game character, modelsheet & matching character selection screen

Adobe Photoshop

Skills improved

  • Photoshop
  • Digital drawing & sketching
  • Analysing art styles/creating style guides
  • sketching pose skeletons
  • Horizontal/vertical iteration process
  • Colours & Using colour schemes
  • Cell-shading
  • Creating character model sheets
  • UI-design & wireframe
  • Experience with a production pipeline
  • Converting peer reviews & critique into design improvements

Improving artistic skills

Starting from little experience in drawing and artistic workflow processes, this project was to further improve myself in artistic skills. A workflow to use was set to gain more experiences with industry-applicable production pipelines, and through it improve on digital drawing, sketching, use of colours, composition, and more.

Art style & theme

An idea doesn't manifest itself. So, to start off I went on Pinterest, chose a 'Burtonesque' art style to use and created a visual style-analysis guide (see slideshow above).
Complimenting the reference style, I also needed a theme. I decided to go with an 'anthropomorphic', 'Noir fiction' theme, having the character resemble a humanized crocodile as private detective.

Following the composition of a mood/reference board, I started the iteration process.

Designing the character

First up, finding & sketching a set of human poses to use as the base for proportion iteration. Choosing a combination of dynamic & static looking poses, I iterated on body-part proportions keeping exaggeration limited.
I selected the most promising iterations to iterate on once more, this time for clothing and body/face features.
I was not happy with what I had; however, with a bit of photoshop magic, I combined two of the iterations and converted it into a better quality line art sketch that would become the base for the final character.

Once the final line art was done, I used it to create numerous iterations of colour schemes to find the best match. I used photoshop to slightly alter HSV values to create 'sub-schemes' for each colour-scheme iteration. With some peer-reviewing, I decided on a monochromatic brown/salmon.
I applied some simple cell-shading to finalise the pose, and created the character's model sheet.

To present the character, I named the character and composed a character-selection screen using the reference style to create the UI-elements and ensured it compliments the theme.

'Snappa' is ready to solve cases!