DIGITAL PAINTING : SILHOUETTE CHARACTER DESIGN

I have been looking at HOW I design my characters. I have been practising using the Silhouette technique. This is a good way of getting ideas out of my head quickly and I think I will use in between my quick sketching technique mentioned in my previous post : DRAWING CHALLENGE : TENTACLES (PART TWO). the quick sketching helps me generate many ideas quickly and produce designs with some form of structure and little detail. The Silhouette technique helps create a shape for the character and a strong shape is very important in character design as it draws the eye. In my view this is just as if not more important than inner details. Combining these two techniques will give me a great basis to work from with each character. Here are a couple of examples of my Basic Silhouettes i have produced. I will be adding some shading etc. to them to show the shapes of the body and uploading at a later date.

This is the base I have made to use for the Silhouette Designs, it comfortably fits 3 characters and if I wish I can expand it to fit 6 with relative ease. The background colour separates the characters from the page.

The first set of Silhouettes I Produced were based on the theme Crustaceans. I wanted to design 3 monsters based on Crustaceans or aspects of Crustaceans such as Crabs, Lobsters etc.

I tried to come up with 3 very different designs which also presented a strong shape. The first design is based on a Spider Crab, The second on a lobster and the third is a mixture with an eels head added in, details like this will be much clearer when shading is added but the silhouettes are strong shapes and that is what I was trying to achieve.

The other Silhouettes page I produced was based on the theme of Mechanical / Robots.

This time the designs are slightly more similar. I liked the idea of basing the shape on a gorilla or ape of some sort. having its knuckles drag was the main aspect I liked and this is present in two of my designs (1 and 3). The head shapes are also quite similar however I tried to create difference between that backs of them. the first design is actually facing away to the left into the page.This isn't clear as of yet but once again when I add 

shading it will be more visible. The second design is on more of a tricycle shaped bottom half as i wanted a design with more stability than the first. The third design is very strongly linked to apes and moves on a kind of Tank Track system.