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Jay: Character Sketch

Jodie Hirst
Oct 9, 2015
3 min read

as this is our first session in this section of production we were introduced to what we were going to be doing over the next few weeks. initially after last year i thought this session would be photoshop, illustrator and in design based learning but we started this week on paper that i later learned would be transferred and made digitally on illustrator. we were told that today we were to draw a character, initially this was a disappointment for me because i don't see myself as a good drawer however when i got going i was able to imagine something in my head and get it down on paper well. we were told that initially we have to make them quick and scribbly, making sure we don't think so much and just draw quickly, he said this because it makes you just draw what you imagine and not think too much into it. the final drawings would come when you had found a character that you thought would work well and you liked. i started by drawing this page of characters...

for some reason a big hat came into my head which then lead me to a cow girl. i liked the idea of using a girl because i liked drawing the hair but i decided to go on a tangent and see what i can create. i then had the idea of trying animals, using a elephant i imagines a small elephant n dungarees, with a cute small look however when i did this it had more on a stretched look and i wasn't liking how it looked i decided to move on and come back if i had a sudden wave of idea. i then just started to draw facial features and came up with a duck type character which again i thought could be interesting but didn't appeal to me. i also tries bee's and then the thought of fruit cereal brought me to try a strawberry but they didn't come out as i wanted and dismissed them. jay then showed us an example of what he did called a character sheet. this was how he wanted us to work. it was a page full of a mouse character in different positions and poses, this made me take a tiger figure and do the same. i think i did it in a good way however i found the process quite difficult, i had to see the animal in those positions to be able to draw it, my imagination would not stretch that far.

here is my result of the first character sheet....

i then tried the idea of a robot because i thought the theme around this could be quite effective. i found this easier to draw in different angles, because of the simple box shapes the forms were easy to imagine in different view points. i gave my character s a smile face to make sure they came across as friendly. i then started with some others....

after this experimentation i knew i wanted a human as my character, for the simple reason i think that in illustrator i will be able to get a good effect. also if a human has a certain character about it it can lead me into a theme that i can work with and experiment with making a good concept for a cereal name and brand including colours and typefaces. i first tried a boy, but i found the hair harder to drawn in different viewpoints and i also wanted to have a cereal aimed at girls just so i knew my audience better, being a girl myself. here is my quick look at drawing a boy figure...

and here is my girl figure..... I chose to develop this character further and do different viewpoints initially i found it hard but getting to grips with it i finally made a character sheet i was proud of, showing all angles...

after creating a charecter we were asked to think about how this charecter would fit on the cereal box, so we drafted some ideas on paper first, however to do this first i thought i needed a theme and a name, so i came up with some names...