silent hero

Hello everyone! This week has been pretty good except for the fact that I contracted a cold which has left me with no voice... The best thing is that I had to work on the DMU open day and talk to people. Anyway, this cold has slowed my progress down this week which means I am behind schedule in terms of what I should be working on atm. I do not want to skip any bits of process in order to finish the project, therefore it is time to step up my game and work harder.

So, I iterated some more, trying to push the high fashion theme and I really like some of the ideas in here. At this point though, because I hadn't spoken to anyone I wasn't very sure how to push the avant-garde concepts. I was afraid that my character would look like a fashionista rather than an armoured hero. In the end, I decided to go for the bottom right design as it looks like a safe yet cool design.

I did iterate a little bit the original design in order to find out what outfit would suit him better. I felt that baggy trousers were not the way to go for an agile sneaky armoured character and in the end the urban outfit was the one that appealed to me the most. I also struggled deciding what to do with the face 'glasses?helmet?headband?goggles?'

while deciding what to do with the face, my boyfriend who always gives me constructive critisism on my designs, had the idea of making my character wear a mask, like the Venetian ones. An expressionless, cold, mysterious mask. Then I took the basic concept and turned it into a futuristic mask. The idea was to have a predominantly metal mask with subtle neon lights going through it.

Once the design was complete, it was time for colouring! I created my colour palettes by picking them from my mood boards. Halfway through the process I realised that the colours that worked better were the ones that were close to each other in the colour palette with the addition of one or two complementaries. Also, my character is a city hero and being realistic, he wouldn't look like a neon sign for everyone to notice him. therefore I chose the more subtle, darker palettes.

And this is my final design, I wanted to do more texture exploration but a tutor came to see me yesterday and he said that I need to start working on the final illustrations and then come back to finish off my designs. He also said that he liked my character exploration and that I gave a wide verity of styles to choose from and from an Art director point of view, that's very good. Him an another teacher agreed that with some direction earlier on, perhaps I could've pushed more the avant-garde idea, but overall, they are happy.

Well, this is it for now, next step is making a cool illustration (hopefully more than one..), until next time, bye!