Done some character design research. Looking into the fantastic progress behind character and environment design. 

This shows a great example of how far you can go in your expression sheets. All states of the character should be realized in the design part of the production. Great to see how they work with reference material to get a good reasult. The importance of a proper pre production keeps getting bigger. I have been in some projects recently with poor pre productions and it led us to go back again and again to re do a lot of finished graphics.

This is some very good example of the progress behind a character board.. To give the character endless variations to begin with. And then slowly sort the good from the bad till you get the perfect character. One designer said he looked at the process as looking at the character through the crazy mirrors at at a funpark. Just bending and twisting hem around to see what sort of expressions you can get out of them. I love looking at pages like these. See versions of the same character.

Great to see character design sheets be a bit more abstract. Like here, more like silhouettes with simple lines. It is very important to give the characters distinct silhouettes to be easily spotted and recognized. Leo Sandberg talks about this in his book “Imagine”. He tries to break down the charcters into simple shapes. Like this example:

Here represented by different races in the story given different shapes. You can easally see whats elven and whats trolls by the design. The triangular design shines through in all of the elven designs. Gives a design likeness to both architecture and character and you get a good sence of unity within the fractions. This is probably a great idea for smaller productions as well. To find a form language that binds the production together. Maybe from a simple shape.