Animation Practice: Character Concept Art

When designing the character I had various wildly different ideas originally but eventually narrowed down a character I thought would be interesting. Ultimately I took elements from each design and integrated them into the final character design.

Space Smuggler concept:

Originally I played around with the concept of a sci-fi smuggler character wearing a futuristic hard-surface outfit. I tried different ideas for his head after as I was happy with his outfit but ultimately I felt like I could do something a little more interesting.

After deciding to try other concepts, I sketched some various, wildly different ideas for a character to see if anything seemed interesting. With another sci-fi character at the top right, I decided to go in the opposite direction and try a film noir approach with a detective character. While I was considering going with this idea and putting an interesting spin on the design, such as a film noir cop in the future, I decided to keep trying other ideas. This eventually left to the bottom left concept which I didn't fully flesh out, but later served as the basis for the design of my final character.

Continuing from the design previous, I tried drawing what I thought an interesting post apocalyptic protagonist would look like, in the same vein as Mad Max and other silent protagonists. This quickly led to the initial concept of a leather jacket-clad, red scarf-wearing female post-apocalyptic character. While I eventually decided to not give the character a jacket or coat, I went through different ideas for the clothing. 

As mentioned previously multiple elements from experimenting with the previous character designs made their way into this character's design. The overall lower body appearance of combat boots and trousers from the last page's last design served as the inspiration for her current design, albeit with vintage motorcycle boots replacing them. The two belts in the sci-fi concept also made their way into this design, with the 2nd belt becoming a shotgun shell belt and the scarf from the original sci-fi smuggler being used and made more important to the overall design.

With the character's design almost finalised, I began thinking of the prop and pose for the character. I quickly decided on her having a Ithica 37 shotgun. The weapon is commonly used in post apocalyptic video games and movies and has essentially become what we think of when we hear 'shotgun'. For the pose I drew two ideas, one a confident yet cold firing stance, as if about to execute someone, and the other a more relaxed pose of her smoking while sitting. I eventually decided to use the first pose as I felt like it would show more of the character, without boxes obscuring her, and also because it shows more of the character's anti-hero personality.

The final pose