Some character and style explorations for a possible story.

Here's a drawing of the school mascot for the high school I taught at last year. Mascots have been a deep obsession of mine since I was small.

It's definitely a mental shift to take what I've learned about character design from a purely visual standpoint (avoiding volume redundancy, avoiding tangents, utilizing contrasts, shape exploitation) and then try putting that knowledge to use to communicate personality.

These sketches are perhaps my most successful to date at trying to communicate WHO a character is instead of just WHAT he looks like. Ball point pen on copy paper.

Here's a preview of my 2007 Sketchbook.

Here are some holdovers from my previous blog that I wanted to post. Two character lineups in two different styles.

The bottom lineup was an assignment for Stephen Silver's character design class, and the top lineup is for a pitch I've been working on.

Here are some character exploration sketches I did for my character design class at the Animation Academy (link at right).

These are all studies for a character based on the kinkajou, a nocturnal South American tree-dwelling relative to the raccoon which also happened to be my favorite animal growing up.

I used to always pretend to be a kinkajou, but in retrospect, it was probably motivated more by the desire to justify my hyperactivity than any legitimate love for the species.

Here's a recent piece that I've been meaning to post. It was inspired by the way Ovi Nedelcu used a similar technique to portray transformation and story in a single image.

Here's a recent sketchbook page that I drew at Costco (as per David Colman's advice). It really is a great place to capture a wide variety of characters, and the customers are so overwhelmed by the Costco shopping experience that they won't even notice your stare.

These drawings will also be a part of my first published sketchbook, due out just in time for the San Diego Comic Con this year. I'll be posting more images from that sketchbook, as well as information on how to get your hands on one very soon.

Probably one of my biggest influences is the video game Street Fighter. A year before I ever played the game I bought the strategy guide and would spend hours studying the character drawings and animation poses. Here's my take on a few of those characters:

This is a redesign of the character below. I've been trying to improve storytelling through my drawings. A successful design is one that captures a personality and tells the viewer a story about who this character is, and I felt the first try was a little bland. (Not to mention top heavy) "What's the story?" is a question I try to keep at the front of my mind whenever designing a character.