Kid Front - process

After class crit where I showed the image of the female character (see previous post), I was told that she looks too healthy and clean and that I should go back to the first bit of concept art I did with the silhouetted boy character. I was told to make the character darker and sicker.

Below I have shown the process of creating the young boy character as well as the new colour - a dark green/grey inspired by the colour scheme shown in my first post.

Again I posed for the reference image. I tied my hair back to get a general idea of the shape of the head and wore a baggy shirt to seem less feminine.

This is the traced outline drawing of the boy character who luckily doesn't look too feminine.

I just need to change the face to look more like a boy.

Here I have changed the boy's facial features, mainly the eyes, to look less like me.

Here I have drawn the "body" of the boy, which makes up the chest that can be seen through the shirt.

This image shows the outlines of all the different body parts from separate layers. You can see that the hands are really quite complex. I am hoping that this won't cause any issues later, but if it does, then I will find a way to fix the issue. This is really meant to give me a lot of freedom in my animation, but may not be entirely necessary.

This image shows the character with all body parts shaded in - this gives a cleaner and clearer view of what the character looks like.

Here is the dark green/grey skin texture that I am using to replace the pale colour I was using before. I played around with the tone of green a lot and decided that if it was too light it made the characters look more like reptiles than sickly children.

This is how I fill in the body shapes with the textures. First, I create the textures in photoshop using photographs and a few different techniques and then paste them into after effects, test the colours

I then add the texture to the swatches panel and then apply it to the character using the live paint bucket tool.

Here I am testing two shades of the above texture against each other to find the best solution.

This shirt has lighter sleeves.

This shirt has darker sleeves and I definitely like this combination a lot more.

This is the character's completed textured apparel.

This character is completely coloured and has added facial features including the white eyes as described in previous posts.

This is the head of the character, complete with hair. The hair can be animated and so can the mouth, which can open and close to eat a pill.

The character in side view - the hair will cover the majority of the facial features, so the eyes/lips have a normal skin colour and don't need to be coloured the same as in the face above.