Personal Development: Inspired by Character Design Module

Considering my chosen mythological character during my Character Design of a Nisse, I was heavily inspired due to my research into this character persona to develop my own illustration of a garden gnome. It shares the typical character features and style of the Nisse character I am trying to develop hence I feel this will be useful to my projects development as it will help me visualise this style of character better.

I was inspired by my 30 Day Challenge designs and my Textured Brush Experiments for the style of this design. I wanted to explore the style of something heavily textures considering the audience I was working towards for my project was a young audience, I felt this would be the perfect opportunity to jump into this further and start exploring some of those digital techniques myself.

I really like the outcome of the overall illustration and the way the character interacts with the environment. If I were to redraw this in the future I would work on making the beard have a lot more depth and motion as its style currently looks unrealistically flat and spiky. Perhaps the use of cones instead of triangles would work better during the sketching stages of my character development in order to correct this?

I feel I managed to execute the lighting well and overall I like the aesthetics I managed to create, as mentioned previously an area I feel would be good to work on is trying to add realistic depth and form to even a heavily stylised design as I found within this experiment, it was an area which was lacking.

I’m excited to continue my development into understanding the various styles and trends within current children’s illustrations, and I really enjoyed being able to practice this within this illustration.

I wanted to make sure I didn’t rely on the use of heavy black outlines for the development of this design considering the effects this has shown during my project so far, so I chose to layout my sketch in each of the separate areas which I had drawn in each of the base colours I had chosen before adding the first layer of colour. Once the colours were added I added the textures and lighting in order to boost the visuals of my character before incorporating them within my environment and I found this process really helpful so I will make sure to implement it within future work.  

I would also like to work on my skills in environmental design as I feel this is another area which could be improved in order to make this final illustration more successful. I am keen to explore this further within my next project as well as my current character design module in order to help me practice this as much as possible as it will be an essential area to understand if I want to create children’s illustrations in the future so that I can communicate the full story.