Character Design Showcase

Character Design Escapees with tutor Andrea Torrejon

We recently concluded an 8 week evening class in character design, taught by the very talented Andrea Torrejon.

Andrea is an experienced industry professional, currently working on a Disney project for Passion Pictures in London.

The class has produced some stunning work - check out the student work below.

First up is some gorgeous work by Sarah Sally, showing her character in a hero pose, as well as supplementary drawings showing a range of poses and also a colour palette.

Character Art has to be detailed enough for the modelers to be able to generate 3D assets, so Sarah also did character turnarounds below:

Costume design is an important part of the process. What do your characters wear? Do they change costume, or is it always the same?

Next up are character designs by Mona May (below). Character Design at Escape Studios is industry-focused, meaning that everything our students do must fit in to a studio pipeline, servicing the needs of a client project.

Mona's character below is "Lanval"; Mona explores the character, costume design and close-ups on the face, both front view and profile.  Character designers must remember that the 3D dept will be relying on them to supply all the information necessary to create the character.

Close-ups and detailed turnarounds will be needed to avoid mistakes that have to be corrected later on. 3D artists will import the designs into Orthographic views in Maya.

The more detail that designers can produce, the more happy the 3D Dept will be.

Below are designs by Natalya Ropotova, showing a character in different design styles.

Natalya also did this excellent design of Chief Two Thumbs Up, below.

In the sketches below Natalya explores different shapes, and records inspirations from real photography.  Good character design can almost always be broken down into simple shapes, and different characters should have strong visual contrasts in other not to confuse the audience.

Finally, check out the excellent work below by Negar Bagheri, who created this line-up of contrasting characters.  Note the contrast of colour, shape and design, making each character an easy visual read.

In the sketch below, Negar explores a single character in different styles; colour, black & white, and a more 2D graphic look vs a more 3D, rounded style.

And check out this great character below:

design by Nega Bagheri

Congratulations to all our students for their excellent and inventive work.  Being able to develop a visual style and make it useful for industry is very much what our evening class in character design is all about. The course ends with an industry brief; in the end all our work as commercial artists must be suited to a production pipeline, and this means understanding the needs of any individual client project, and making sure that enough information is supplied to keep the project moving forward.

The Escape Studios Animation Blog offers a personal view on the art of animation and visual effects. To find out more about our new BA/MArt, now recruiting for September 2019, follow this link.   To apply, visit the official page here.