In this 3 week concentration workshop, we were tasked with creating a character from inkblots, character posing, and creating a final illustration based on our precedent findings.

The character that I picked was a young gondola driver living in Venice, with the following 6-word character story to serve as the basis of their design:

“lonesome gondola driver looking for love”

The gist of the story is about a young gondola driver living by himself in Venice, Italy. A place where romance and love is prominent within the city, our young gondola driver here feels lonely isolated within his own community. He’s not confident about his job as he thinks being a gondola driver is at the bottom of the barrel, and furthermore he’s surrounded by people brimming with happiness yet he finds them radiating too brightly sometimes. He’s looking for a partner in this city filled with love, and the story would revolve around his journey in seek of love.

The character wants are “finding his perfect partner” when in reality the main character needs “to love himself” and realize that you don’t need a special someone in your life to feel happy and loved. This project is about self love within yourself and accepting support from others around your local community.

Ink Blots

Out of 8 pages of ink blots, these were the ones that I picked to proceed onto the next exercise. As I started to move forward, I decided to settle onto this particular blot and worked from there.

At first I wanted to highlight his hunchback and his lanky appearance within the ink blot. By making him have a lanky and droopy appearance I wanted to evoke a sense of low-confidence and low self-esteem within the character, which can be seen in the following character posing sheets.

Although I didn’t create an expression sheet for this character, I wanted his silhouette and shape language to convey a sense of uncertainty, like a gentle giant. Two big inspirations during my thought process for this character was the main antagonist in Ratatouille and the dad from the movie Coraline. Both characters have a hunchback appearance and after the climactic event in the movies, both characters seek to better themselves for the future.

In terms of illustration styles, I went for a more grainy editorial style, as the story pitch for this project seems to be more relatable to things like Disney films and movies centered around a light-hearted fun. Having a highly rendered illustration with properly designed backgrounds would be nice, however we didn’t have time to cover that much detail.

Some examples that I had for style references are the following:
https://twitter.com/joze_phine_
https://twitter.com/tabisumika
https://twitter.com/matayosi

Final Illustration

For the final illustration I wanted to draw a scene that isolates the main character from the rest of his surroundings. By using the canals in Venice and it’s elaborate architecture, the young gondola driver is slowly entering an area that is covered in shadow, compared to the rest of the setting being illuminated in light. I wanted to illustrate the idea that everyone in the community lives in light and enjoys their lives and relationships with people, whereas our protagonist is slipping into the darkness because he feels as if he doesn’t belong with the community.

If I were to continue on this project, I would study the architecture of Venice more and flush out some characters that the protagonist would frequently interact with, creating a variety of facial expressions for our protagonist, and storyboard some key moments within the story.

Closing Thoughts

Overall this course was a lot of fun and the 3 weeks that we spent developing a character and their story was an intriguing and refreshing new pace. Learning insightful exercises like ink blotting and getting some information about how the industry works was also a bonus, and gave me new insights on how to work.

If I had more time to spend within this class, I would like to have learned how to do costume design and also break down past/famous examples of character design and storyboarding; a breakdown to the nitty gritty so to say.

Thank you again for the workshop opportunity and I look forward to possibly learning with the same instructor again given the chance!