Character Design was a class that was definitely a bit of a challenge for me this semester. Although I am a graphic design major, I knew when I started this class that I wanted to improve in my illustration abilities, so I would easily get frustrated when something did not come out the way I envisioned. At first, I was not loving what I was making for my assignments, however, as the semester progressed I started to worry less about the final product and focus more on my growth. When my professor mentioned our final assignment being a character turnaround, I was overwhelmed as I had never drawn a single character from more than one angle. You gotta do what you gotta do though, so I tried my best and surprisingly ended up having a ton of fun completing the assignment.
First, we had to choose one of our favorite characters drawn over the semester, so I picked one from a previous assignment where I drew an anthropomorphized human character (original pictured above). I decided to do Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas because it is a movie that I have always loved for as long as I can remember, and I thought Sally as a possum was just perfect. I knew I wanted to make her look much more possum-like in this project in comparison to the original that I made, as I feel it was sort of giving a mouse more than a possum. To do that I gave her a rounder body and a bigger nose and snout which I feel made a huge difference, but besides that, I kept the design the same and color-dropped all of the colors. The pattern on her dress was definitely the most challenging part of this project because of the patchwork pattern, and the anatomy might not be the most correct, but despite all that, I am really proud of this turnaround and think it taught me a lot about perspective. What do you think?!
