Illustration 1: Key steps in illustration- Part 4: Style-Exercise 7: Character development
Collect as many examples as possible of different characters – newspapers and magazines are a particular good source. Catalogue these characters as types – babies, children, sportsmen, old women – create your own category headings.
Decide upon a character you would like to create. This might be one from a book or story, or based on an archetype such as a businessman or vicar’s wife.
Begin to brainstorm around your character – perhaps there are characters from the media or your own life you would like to focus on.
Draw your character from the front, from the side and from the back. It may help to draw lines from the neck, shoulder, waist and knees as an aid to scale and to ensure a sense of proportion. (This is known as 360o drawing.)
Draw your character over and over again. Get into role and adopt their mood, expression and personality. It often helps to work out what they are thinking or saying. Try moving the facial features around to extremes and using a few lines and dots to represent the face. Be conscious of the contribution clothing and costume makes in describing a character.
Then try another, different, character. Make sure you come up with someone completely different, not just the same person in different clothes.
I then went through various portrait focused books and some old movie magazines which included interesting characters.
After research and collating visual references I moved onto my first character. I wanted to create a troubled 60’s inspired detective/policeman. I feel like this would give an interesting edge to the character in a suit.
For my second character I wanted to combine characteristics that were opposing each other to create something surreal. Referring to my ideas/visual references I wanted to combine Egyptian mythology with a
To begin this task I looked through the various images I had already collated and the task on ‘characters’ reminded me of work from photographer Cecil Beaton. Beaton has a large catalogue of work, photographing various celebrities and interesting characters. I really enjoy his work and have a few of his photo books. These are scans from those books.
Looking at the various references and inspired by previously researched artists such as Lewis Rossignol I began to draw the character. I then went over this in an ink, loosely drawing lines in an attempt to create an interesting/fluid illustration.
60’s style woman. I used the same process to draw these images, beginning in pencil, then ink. After producing the image in ink I added water colour. I then scanned and pre-printed the images, adding oil pastel tones and abstract markings.
I aimed to create a troubled 60’s inspired policeman. I wanted to show the person being active (walking) one casually and one quicker. I also included a closer portrait of the character leant at a bar drinking. With the markings I wanted to add movement to the character.
For the Egyptian/60’s collusion character I showed the character smoking, standing and in a fighting stance. I wanted to show multiple sides of a surreal style character. I used a loose illustration style inspired by Lewis Rossignol and Richard Haines in particular, 2 artists previously researched. I feel like my outcomes are interesting but appear unfinished. I think more work is needed on these characters, perhaps more details and drawn in a different style to add to the narrative behind the characters.
