Animation Character Design: Xenopus

Here are some of the sketches of my development of the sorceress Xenopus for my animated short based on the radio play my friends and I did last summer.

As with my earlier post I thought it would be interesting to show how I work thorough the character and the scene it self.

I knew for Xeopus I wanted to have a character that expressed a sinister quality and corrupted by her dark magic, but I also wanted a bit of allure to her as well.

 

I go through initial sketches just to see what I come up with and where it takes me.  Usually I know what I'm going for but actually translating that to paper can be a challenge.  I also know that in the scene she appears she will be conjuring up a demon so I wanted to express that madness of dark power.

Seeing some things I like in the initial sketches, I begin to refine these.  Feeling I had a general idea on the character I begin to refine the face a bit.

 

 I was liking where I was going with the face but had a problem with the hair.  It looked too proper.  I wanted her to be more mystical so I worked in what I thought was Kirbyesque headgear

 

I also knew that in the scene she would be studying her spellbook so I began a few sketches bringing her into the scene.  You can see I actually begin working out some of the props and action details with notes written within the sketches themselves.

A bit more revision on the clothing and I ended up here.

Animation Character Design

I've been working on the Tower of Xenopus animation project and making quite a bit of progress.  I'll be posting throughout the week and perhaps next ending with an actual thirty second clip from the narrated intro.

I wanted to document my progress so today I'm going to discuss the beginnings of my character design.

My goal was first to create a good cartoon character that would be easy to animate and position in various angles.  I began work with the characters of Slick Vinny the wizard and Geedleesmote the dwarf.

  

My initial sketches I felt were pretty good if I were to do something like a comic book but I wanted to simplify the characters even more.  I really wanted to just capture the 'essence' of the character with as few lines and possible - a real challenge for me but I think I was finally getting somewhere.

  

Here I got to just the simplified characters of Geedle and Vinny.

Below is a test "cell".

I'll be adding a bit more details to the dwarf's armor.  After working with the animation software a bit I think I'll add a bit more detail to the characters but as of now, this is where I'm at with them.

Next: Xenopus Character Design