A big part of the fantasy brief that we were given, involves concept development, and this isn’t surprising, as it is one of the most essential and critical stages of new product development steps. Once an idea is generated (and usually in the working world, screened for quality), the concept development stage is what follows next – carried out by keeping in mind the needs of the customers as well as the nature of the product.
For our fantasy brief, character design is something that is required, so we began with doing some concept art for a character. Everyone experiences this process a little differently, and some people find it more difficult than others, so we were provided with a template later on in the lesson, to break things down a little bit and give us an indication on where to start. For me, character design can be really fun but also really challenging as well, and if I don’t have a clear idea of what I am supposed to be doing, I struggle with the vast sea of limitless ideas you can get. Sometimes, when things are a bit more narrowed down, I can work more efficiently. Of course, creative freedom is also extremely important, and there needs to be some room to explore and experiment, but with the brief, our only real limit is the genre, fantasy, and as I have discussed before, there are multitudinous characters and character types to choose from. With so many options, I found it a little daunting with where to begin.
However, we began with something easy – names. We were given an extremely useful website, which generates fantasy names based on the fantasy creature you select. I mainly used ‘dragon’ and ‘elf’, because dragons usually have epic, deep names, and elven names I have always found very beautiful.
Here are some of the names that I picked out:
Fauni
- Jai
- Emer
- Krado
- Orryn
- Valia
- Roza
- Mirya
- Torross
- Finion
- Ilbryn
- Daenys
After selecting a name that we like, we then moved onto the templates, which had different sections to do with the character boxed out. The character background, which would be where we put the information about our character, the mood board, to add three or more images for inspiration, the colour palette, and of course, the concepts!
I did already have an idea for the story and fantasy world I was going for, so I decided on creating one of the characters I plan to include. I decided this would be a good chance to outline some more of the personality and background of the character.
I chose the name Kreo Ardwulf because I felt that it suited my character quite well. He is the villain in my story, the dark overlord with a troubled past. I felt that I could go into great detail with his character, but I didn’t want to be rushed, so for this task, I only outlined the key information and main ideas about him. The mood board was very easy to create because I use Pinterest frequently and it’s perfect for finding fantasy artwork and inspiration. As for the colour palette, we were also given a website which picks out the colours from an image you can insert. This was really handy, but since I hadn’t designed the character yet, I inserted a screenshot of my mood board and picked out colours from that. They are dark and foreboding, so I think they fit well with Kreo.
For the concept art, I chose to go with paper instead of digital drawing because personally, I’m much faster when I work on paper and I wanted to get some artwork actually finished. I do enjoy digital art but I am still quite new at it so it takes me a long time to get the linework accurate. However, I do like how easy it is to undo mistakes and the colour options and different brushes, so I will be doing a lot of my concept art digitally. For this, however, paper was the best option, to get some rough sketches down that encompass my ideas.
I decided to draw Kreo in the three main stages of his life and explain each one with the basic concepts I have. Again, I plan to go into much further depth for him in my own time (so I don’t feel as rushed) because he is one of the main characters of my show. For this lesson, I focused on getting down the key ideas for his character so that I can go back later and use this as a reference.
Personally, I like the first two drawings the most, and the sword isn’t bad – but the third one is a bit too heavily inspired by Sauron from Lotr, which I will remedy when I do some more designs for him. I really love the character I have created so far and based on my fantasy research, villains with realistic backgrounds and unfair struggles that have to lead them to where they are, are regarded as far more interesting, so I focused on making him a real, fleshed-out character that the target audience would find compelling.
I will make a separate post solely for Kreo and I will link it here: