Portfolio 01 Week 01

Character Designs Week 01

This week our portfolio project was announced. Since I am focusing on concept art, I am planning on using this opportunity to go through the whole development process for the Brothers Grimm story, Rapunzel. I plan on referring to the book, "The Skillful Huntsman," to guide me, as well as examples seen in portfolios from other visual development artists working in the industry.

Below is my schedule for the whole project.

I know it looks like a lot, and it is but knowing how I work, it seems doable. I estimate to work around 6 hrs a day on this. We'll see how that pans out after the first week.

To help organize myself more, I made a PureRef board showing what I would ideally want for each portfolio sprint. It is displayed below.

The first 4 weeks will be focused on character designs. I plan on designing 5 characters. The most important ones are Rapunzel, Frau Gothel, and the Prince. Therefore, if I get cut short on time, the last week spent on the parents would be cut and I would focus on have 3 really well-designed characters. 

This week, I have started designing Rapunzel. I started off with a PureRef of everything that I could think of when it came to a Rapunzel character. 

After creating the PureRef, I began making a bunch of thumbnail sketches for Rapunzel's silhouette. I tried not to constrain myself so that I could really explore in this stage.

I ended up going with a design where her hair is all bunched up at the top because it reminded me of the cabbage plant Rapunzel is named after, called "rampion". Because it looked too mature I changed the design to make it look younger.

After creating that design, I decided I wanted to theme everything in a Rococo style. This was the PureRef I used. I wanted to make sure I included the frills, flowers and big dresses. Below are the various design passes I did for that.

Finally after deciding Rapunzel's design, I thought about her character. I decided that her character would not want to leave the tower and that she enjoyed staying there. That will cause later story changes as well that I'll explain as I get to them. Because Rapunzel enjoys staying in her tower, I decided to make her happy and almost spoiled by Frau Gothel. Below is her final design that I will be finishing and coloring in the next week.