Animation 260 Milestones

Milestone 1

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Making characters has been one of my many hobbies ever since I got into RPG's, (roll-playing games), and I'm aiming to become a concept artist for some gaming company like Bioware or Bethesda or possibly for hire in sci-fi or fantasy movies and series that would require such. For Animation 260 I'm making a character buildup process from start to finish starting with black and white pencil concepts. For future milestones this will lead to colored concepts with prismacolor pencils to Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop concepts to finally a high polygon character model. I chose a character I started up a little over year ago named Tanwen, a white human pirate girl whom is a chaotic good aligned hireling and captain of a grappler ship known as the XGP-2 and nicknamed the "Black Phoenix". Below is a model of the ship and an old portrait I did of Tanwen.

I've changed Tanwen some since the early illustration I did of her over a year ago and kept making little changes throughout the concepts until finally getting a look I'd feel comfortable with. Below are some black and white concepts of Tanwen.

The Illustration of Tanwen below will later be imported in Adobe Illustrator and traced over then colored over in Adobe Photoshop.

Finally after getting some of the black and white concepts done for Tanwen I did front and side view Illustrations of Tanwens' head and entire body, first naked and then layered over in clothes that will be used as guides when I finally get to building the model. The reason I did the illustrations of Tanwen naked first then layered over in cloths is because I will be modeling her body and clothes separately rather than all in one model. That way if I ever use this model anywhere else, perhaps even a game, I can always change the clothes to show Tanwen in various outfits without having to constantly redo her body in the process. It's kind of like in many of those RPG games when you change gear on your character or strip them of it. It annoys me when a character model body and clothing are merged on the same model piece and tends to come off as a kind of poor excuse or shortcut for getting the work done faster with less effort in my opinion at least. Don't get me wrong though, sometimes having them merged on the same model piece can be for the better depending on the use of the character.

Head Views

Body Views (Naked)

Body Views (Clothed)

Body Views (Outer Coat)

Other Characters

Below are some black and white concept examples of some other characters I've done in the past. The ones below are actually made based off of people I know who requested character avatars of themselves based off of the whole geeky sci-fi/fantasy world I made up just like how a lot of game companies do themselves. The first character below is a male dark elf, aka drow, necromancer I made based off myself, (yes you can laugh at me all you want for that, I know it's dorky, and no he's not intended to be a pretty boy).