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Below are many pencil and paper sketches showcasing the development of ideas for my original character design.

My first design idea is a greek goddess type character, with a small yet rounded feminine body and an aquatic theme. Her head is designed like a seal’s, with an additional flowy and wavy hair-like portion on top that’s reminiscent of sea waves, or coral. She wields a magical staff and wears a flowy semi-see-through Goddess-like dress. I believe this design should be suitable to transition into a 3D model due to its simplicity and potential for the inclusion of interesting texture work, including shiny clear texturing for her ‘hair’, and rough seal-skin texturing for her skin.

My next two concepts are a pale girl with fluffy hair and a lobster king. Whilst I like the way I’ve designed these two characters, I don’t believe they will be suitable for transitioning to 3D models due to the way I’ve designed their more detailed and complex hair. I could potentially alter the style of their hair to make it easier to model, though.

This character is a curvy female anthropomorphic rabbit, with a small puff of hair between hair ears, an ‘about to laugh’ expression, and wearing a thick sweatshirt. Whilst the design of this character is fun it may be a challenge to model her having all smooth and curvy lines with nothing angular or linear, as modelling curved and spherical objects can be harder and more time consuming than modelling flat ones.

I have realised that using a simplistic and stylised aesthetic (as seen above) for the visual style of my character may result in not only a more unique design but also an easier modelling process, as creating the limbs may take less time whilst still providing a professional-looking end product. This type of character design features both curved and flat surfaces, meaning there will be enough variety in the final 3D model without it being too complex to create. I am most likely going to use a design like this for my final model.

Here are some sketches where I tried to figure out how I’d like to design the aesthetic proportions of the character’s body. Above is more realistically proportioned that I created through applying the use of realistic human form, and the bottom is more stylised and unrealistic, which I prefer and believe looks superior.