Reef character... and new lessons are learnt

Recently I had another character project to work on but this time it had to be inspired by the motif "Reef" this could be anyway I wanted, shape and form, colours, rhythms etc... So I started this project as strong as I could by getting books out from the library on reefs and sea sides. Moodboards were made and I looked at the colours typically found in coral reefs. I really liked the idea that the reef was alive and there was personality to the different structures and rhythms inside it.

After the moodboards I drew some pictures a creatures from the reef and reef based humans (fishermen). These thumbnails were done so I could understand some of the qualities of this reef motif. Drawing turtles particularly interested me because they had this bored lacklustre feeling about them. Like they were tired but knew they had to do what they were doing. They also had some interesting patterns on the shells and the silhouette of the head was quite angular and squared off.

I continued exploring shapes and silhouettes in many ways. I couldn't find one thing that particularly gripped me. I did many early designs and found it hard to develop one I felt was strong enough after lots of thumbnails both of silhouettes and little sketches.

I eventually settled on a design of a scuba man. He has quite a square head with the facial features disguised by his breathing apparatus. I imagined him as this slumped not happy henchman for a sea theme super villain. Just tottering about doing his job from day to day ( a bit of a yes man).

So the next part was testing out this design and making some changes to the body and head. To do this I decided to use digital painting because its something I'm still trying to understand. With the head sections it went really well and I've found that I'm ok in grey scale. The problem was doing the finals where I used colour I realised there so much I've got to practice and work at before I can do any decent designs. So what I got out of this project was that I'm understanding the process now and I know how to generate ideas but I need to work on my skills so I can put these concepts down effectively.