Evaluation
Over all, I feel that my final outcome have gone well. In the beginning I wanted to create some sort of illustration, however has I began to progress I started to feel like I don’t know how my character would look and how i want to present her. Originally I was going to do an illustration of my character with her dragons for maybe a front cover of a game or an advertisement. I began to create sketches for my character, researching the history behind my chosen country for somewhere and other artists, I began to get inspired by the actual concept behind the characters. I didn’t want to to just paint a random girl, I wanted to design a character who’s unique and carries many symbolism within her design. I wanted to create a design that reflects on her personality as well as reflect on her surroundings, it needed to be strong so I ended up choosing concept art over illustration because this on its own took a very long time. The one problem I had was then choosing an art style. I’ve researched other artists who’s working or have worked in the games company and have looked at their work and what they’ve done. I’ve also went on youtube to look at speed paints to get inspiration. I wanted my game to have that Asian appeal so I’ve looked in MMOPRG and RPG games and have even played some myself to get the idea and feels to what it’s like. These types of games are usually heavily inspired by either the Chinese culture or Japanese anyways and have a particular kind of art style that I really want to reflect within my character design.
Other problems that I have encountered were how i’m meant to portray my character without going over board or showing not enough of these symbolism that I wanted to achieve. I narrowed down my research to “cliche” but not too cliche. An example of this was when I went on to research colours you would usually associate with Japan or China that people would easily recognize. These colours ended up to be my main colour scheme used in my final outcome. However because the colours were so bright and happy, I had to find a way to tone it down. My character/protagonist is a strong independent princess who later became a warrior. She wields the power of the dragons which is frankly foreign to her and her country (Chinese dragons when she’s Japanese). Everything about her character goes against the rules of her family and country. She’s different and people saw this as a negative thing. She later on would become the legendary hero of both China and Japan and is heavily respected by both countries after she saved the world from falling into the hands of evil.
I have created my final outcome on Photoshop. Throughout this process I really have come across challenging obstacles. One of the most challenging obstacle that I’ve come across was definitely the character’s hair. The amount of times I had to redo the hair was frustrating so I ended up going into youtube to watch hair tutorials as well as getting myself reference. The original hair design did not quite follow physics as well as it being overly block like and did not watch the face at all. It was a complete fail, and I even began on wanting to create a different design to the hair over all. This also became a problem because I purposely picked out that tied up long hairstyle on purpose. In traditional China and Japan long hairstyles were admirable and was considered beautiful among all other hairstyles. Long not tied up hair was considered the most beautiful particularly in women. High class women would usually keep their hair down. Having my princess having her hair tied back with spikes bobbles at the end is meant to represent her wild personality. She didn’t care about beauty, she didn’t care about what was desirable or what is to be expected of her as a princess. She was a traditional tomboy, or that’s how I wanted to portray her anyways. She much preferred to explore the world, she was curious and have ambitions. Women back then also had no freedom, they would spend most of the time locked up inside and hiding behind screens. This was the life that Tatsuo did not want.
Another obstacle that I found difficult was definitely colour in general. Getting the shadow and highlight right with colour personally is very challenging to me. Thinking about what colour would go where and what colour would compliment another as well as keeping it in the theme very challenging. I ended up using mainly primary colours, this was an easy route as well as it fits well with my character’s culture which is of course China and Japan. I had to keep re-doing this over and over, deleting and making new layers because there were some sort of issue that’s going on whether the colour ca’t be seen very well or the colour is too blocky/flowy or the colour did just not match the character. It was very challenging, but this ended up being a success and i’m genuinely proud of how this had turned out.
What didn’t go as planned was the shield. My original intent was to create a house hold item as a weapon. The Japanese Umbrella that ended up becoming a weapon was what I’ve planned. I still took this idea throughout to the final outcome however, fitting the actual umbrella head with my character illustration was awfully challenging. the originally drawn on umbrella head which is going to be used as a shield did not fit at all. It didn’t yell out Japan, it was kind of a disaster. Still wanting to have this umbrella weapon I ended up placing the shield at the back. I’ve asked the class and teachers what they thought about this idea and they all agree on this. In fact this became another great symbolism. If you look close enough you’ll see that the shield umbrella looks like the Japanese flag. To further exaggerate this and make it slightly more obvious I decided to paint white clouds to represents the white border within the Japanese flag. This gives the character a sense of place and belonging as Japan is technically ruled by her bloodline as she’s from the royal family.
Finding brushes to use in Photoshop was also challenging. I mainly practice my painting at home on my phone, so taking this a step further in Photoshop was definitely a challenge. I’m glad I’ve chosen to do this though however because it has more tools that I can use and experiment with as well as brushes which I could use to give and get different textures. Because Photoshop has so many, finding the right one as well as knowing what effects they give took a lot of testing and I was going through a lot of brushes and testing them before even starting to paint my final outcome. This took a lot of time out of my FMP, but it was really worth it and I’ve really enjoyed painting this character.
Digital Design portfolio 