Practising with character design

Having a little experiment with shape theory 

So after I did some simple research into what colour, shape and light theory was as well as looking into the psychology of how different colours portray certain moods, I thought it would be a good idea to now try and apply some of this knew knowledge into my design work. I couldn't really touch on the use of light and colour theory just yet as I am still in the sketching and jotting down ideas design stage of my project so I couldn't experiment with these just yet, however I could practice a little with the use of shape theory when it comes to designing characters.

Shape theory isn't something that I want to base my whole project around however, it would be quite nice to try and use some of it's methods to help my characters portray their certain moods in some way. So from what I have learnt from this theory is that there are three main types of shapes that are sometimes used to help create characters to help give them a certain feel and these may be very subtly incorporated into the design or actually be the main base for that design. The three shapes that are used are a circle, square and triangle and each of them help give a character design a certain feel. So for example:

                    CIRCLE - Soft                            

                            SQUARE - Stong                                

TRIANGLE - Sharp

These shapes are commonly used in the character design process used for creating cartoons as creating characters incorporating the use of these three shapes helps to make them more expressive and easier to understand. It's a method essentially used to help strengthen a characters design so for example if you were going to have a happy, friendly character they would most likely have circular smooth shapes in their design but if you were making a character who was supposed to be bitter and evil then they would most likely have sharper more structured shapes added to their design. I have popped some visual representations I found on Google of how shape theory is used in character design below as it is easier to show examples then to try and explain it all in writing.

I thought it would be, to start of my design process, a nice idea to have a little go at just drawing out some very rough 'character designs' that use different types of shapes as their bases myself. As I am still practising with trying to speed up the rate in which I work and making sure I am not spending far too much time on my pencil sketches I made sure to draw at a quick pace when it came to doing these designs. Overall I drew out a page of shape based character sketches super quickly, it took me less than fifteen minutes, just so that I could have a little practice with the basics of uses shapes in my designs and to see what the outcome was. I tried to have a quick go at both anatomy and facial designs and my sketch page can be seen below. 

I tried to have a little experiment with just putting different shapes together to see what types of character bodies I could create and I am sure there are hundreds of different combinations that I could have sketched out but I wanted to limit it to only few as I was just experimenting with this theory and didn't want to spend to long on it as it is only a practice study. I also thought as well as having a go at making some figures using shapes, I thought I should also experiment with drawing head shapes too using the circle, triangle and square as influences to see what they would look like. I think that these actually worked a lot stronger than the character figures did just due to the fact that I can instantly tell what short of mood each character is meant to portray just by looking at the shape of the faces. You can easily see that the circular face is meant to be a much softer character than both the triangular and square faces.

Seeing as the use of shapes to create designs seemed to have worked out quite nicely in my opinion, especially with the faces, I think I might try and incorporate this technique into my more official character design sketches which is the part of the process that I need to move onto next.