Personal Development and SMART Target: Chick Character Design Continuation Part 1

I am growing increasingly fond of the chick characters I keep working with during my personal development. I find them fun to create whilst resulting in playful illustrations overall. For this design I decided to try something completely new for the body form of my chick, using inspiration from the artist ‘Eat Chicken’ or ‘吃貨雞仔’ illustrations.

I really liked the use of overly exaggerated features to add further levels of innocence to my design, I decided to create the chick as though they were a ‘giant’ with a tiny head as I felt this would be quite interesting to explore. I love the addition of a cherry on the top of their head as it helps provide this scale reference to both younger and older audiences.

I decided to use cell shading for the completion of this experiment rather than the soft texturing I had been using in my previous explorations as I wanted to investigate how this would affect the overall aesthetics of the design. I prefer the use of solid lines and cell shading as it creates a much bolder and childlike appearance in the characters which works well with their given concepts and themes.

I also took inspiration from my previous illustrations regarding this character by incorporating both the oval background to represent the sky as well as the grass underneath them to create more of a fully-fledged environment for the character.

I really like the way this design turned out and I would love to explore creating more characters using this style in different body forms as I feel I could create a full series of playful characters which I could later turn into a series of children’s illustrated stories in the future.

This would be incredibly exciting and I would love to pursue this further when I have the time, perhaps this could be something to begin working on over the summer in order to help me development my skills within this specialism before returning to Level 6 of my studies. 

SMART Target:

Goal: Create another chick character design to be used as the new updated icon for my art tag ‘Duckyy.Draws’

Measurable Success: I will measure the success by the level of positive interaction my post manages to gather on various social media platforms.  I will may also create a poll where the audience can vote which design they feel works best, my current icon or the updated version.

What I aim to Achieve: I feel I have grown a lot in my understanding of children’s illustration and the audiences surrounding it. Due to this I feel my icon would work better to display my updated skills as I feel the muted colours and cute expressions work much better for the target audience than my current bold, overly-saturated design.

Realistic Achievements: I will create a new social media icon taking inspiration from the colouring method of this design, using a much more gentle and muted colour palette which will be uploaded and used as my new social media icon.

Time Plan: I don’t feel this illustration would take too much time to complete, due to this I would aim to have it finished in under a week. I will aim to work on this character on a night time as I am winding down from my other projects in order to complete the design to my designated schedule. I am trying to be more critical of the times I allow myself for tasks in order to help me develop the skills to work well under pressure.