Character Design
- valentina Wong
- Apr 9
- 2 min read
I started on the character design for my animated character. All of these were done in Procreate.
I had read in the book 'The Art of Up' that simplexity was the formula they used when creating the characters. Specifically how they assigned different shapes to different characters, already visually representing their personalities or their behaviours through connotations.
They wrote that 'The circle represents the future; the square symbolises the past.' and '“Most of the dynamic characters surrounding Carl—Dug, Russell, the Bird, and Ellie—have curves. They are sort of rolling, o ff-balance, moving forward. Then here comes Carl, least likely to change. He’s the square that all of those circles have to push so that he can actually start making changes.”
These are the initial sketches of what the main character (for now he’s named Gary) looks like. I experimented with different shapes and slightly different expressions. Ultimately, his character shouldn’t be too hard to draw as I will have to animate him and I'm still a novice. I chose this final design of Gary as he has the right amount of stylisation to easy to draw ratio.
His outfit is simple, and I chose to draw his body in a more angular way. This is heavily inspired by Carl in up and how he is represented by a square/rectangle. This choice was also to showcase how rigid he was as a character, how supposedly solid and firm he is.
After some deliberation, I felt that Gary should be the only one animated, so he visually and figuratively does not fit into the world around him. Conveying that he is internally detached from the people and environment around him. That even though the world around him is filled with textures and colours, he’s stuck behind flat lines and black and white, literally emotional flattening. I made the first scene of him as a child holding an artwork to tie in the animated/mixed media/art house genre factors in better. Gary is an artist, so it makes sense that he is an animation, that when he cries, colours explode and paint the screen.
Gary in a picture:
I had done an animation test on Procreate on an iPad. I did try Krita, which was a computer animation software, but I didn’t have a drawing tablet, so it made it a lot harder to make something visually appealing. It was a relatively simple 4 frame walk. This test was mostly for me to boost my confidence in animations, and I had watched multiple videos on how to make 2d animations. I was quite satisfied with how it came out, though it was a little choppy, I think it will add to the stiffness/hardened nature of my character.
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