The beginning of the design process

Thinking about my candy based characters


So now that I have finally decided on what my final studio work idea is going to be and have done some very basic image research and a rough character sketch to help get my designs flowing it knew it was time for me to continue with my research process and start getting some more solid work done. I thought the best starting point for me, which is something that always helps me generate some creative ideas, is to make some mood boards of different types of sweets. I had a basic idea of a few characters I could make based off different types of candy that could pair with a certain emotion but I thought doing some image research may help me expand these ideas and come up with some new and characters designs. So I created a couple of mood boards, which can be seen below, that contain a collection of images of different types of candy and sweets. I tried to get as many different examples as possible without going too overboard as there is a hell of a lot of different sweets out there and I could have spent forever compiling them into mood boards. 

So after creating these two mood boards full of images of candy I started to have a think about the different characters I could create that are based around a certain type of sweet and type of emotion. I was able to make quite a good list of different design possibilities for my characters but obviously I will I won't be using all of these ideas as final character ideas, if I did there Is no way I would have art book done by the end of my third book, so I will try to focus on maybe about 4 or 5 to make into final designs. The list of possible candy based designs I thought of are in the list below.



Sweets & emotions

• sour apple sweet or cough drops

          angry, bitter, sour 

• popping candy, fun dip, flying saucers 

         hyperactive, energetic, a little bit mad 

• lilac sweet, candy floss, marshmallow 

          soft, gentle, sweet, kind 

• humbug or spearmints 

          smart and sensible 

• bubble gum or taffy 

          bubbly, friendly, happy 

• valentines sweets or love hearts 

          passionate, infatuated, hopeless romantic

• chocolate 

          relaxed, smooth, calm

• liquorice 

          moody, negative, mute 



When I was making this list I tried to make sure I was thinking about lots of different possibilities for my designs, which is why some of the characters have more than one sweet option or emotional option. I just wanted to make sure I had a good amount of possible design concepts for each character. Also, as I don't want my concept to be too similar to that of 'Inside Out' where each character portrays one certain and key emotion, I wanted to make sure my characters have a little bit more of a mixture when it comes to their emotional state.

Overall I am pretty pleased with the idea I have managed to come up with so far as I think it gives me a really good starting point for possible character designs and I will be able to pick and choose which ones I think are the strongest and I should take foreward as final designs. Obviously this is just the beginning of the design process so these are simply rough ideas at the moment but as I research more and even start to do some sketch work I will be able to expand upon them and make them stronger character designs. Which means now I think the best thing for me to do would be to make a mood board for each of the characters I have thought of above and then try and get some initial sketches down for each one and see where It goes from there.