Yr2 Week 16: Character concepting!

I'm not quite sure what to make of this week! I've been unwell all week meaning I haven't really left the house very much, so i unfortunately missed most of my classes this week and haven't really been able to drink! Considering I've had a few days consisting of doing pretty much nothing except from playing Hearthstone to rest, on my productive days I feel like I've got somewhere!

I started to make some silohuette designs for my character project, I'm not really too fond of silohuettes, so most of these are pretty bad and unrecognisable, but I was quickly able to select which one was my favourite.

As my silohuettes where horrendous, I selected the one I liked the most and developed it further, until I was happy with the basic design I'd created.

After selecting my silohuette to work on, I edited my base mesh a little further, though I am not completing the anatomy at this point as some places such as elbows, feet and such may be hidden by clothing, and as this isn't an exceptionally long project, I want to conserve time where possible.

Getting this far with the character, I had already decided for my characters companion I wanted it to be a small creature. Due to the witch/sorceress character I created, I decided that I wanted this to be either a frog or a cat, but considering the dichotomy, I decided to go with a frog, as a frog that is quite ugly and scary in contrast with my sorceress will provide quite a nice pair.

Sketches/silohuettes of frog/toad designs. I was originally going to create a frog but decided a Toad would be more fitting and that the Amazon Horned Frog was quite an interesting looking character to use.

With my ideas selected, I drew out a pose for my sorceress in the concept, and then photobashed parts of my base model over the top of it, saving time on drawing anatomy, using the warp tool to ensure it fit the perspective correctly.

This is an image that shows a very quick paintover of the clothes for my character.

And this is the image fully painted over in black and white!

After I had finished painting the black and white concept, I started doing some value studies for my character to push the design further ready to be coloured. I preferred an overall darker colour theme, but due to the fact I wanted my character to be light in opposition to the frog, I decided to take both a light and dark version to develop in colour to see which worked better with colour applied.

Here are some extremely quick paintovers with the layers set to colour to show the colours on the character, here I can see the lighter colours definitely work better and show on the character better. My favourites of the sorceress are the second and fourth, and my favourites of the frog are the sixth and second.

I now need to develop a more polished final concept from these picking the colours myself and my peers belive work best, I will do this in the upcoming week and hope to get the vast majority of my modelling finished this week also.