Introduction
This week I officially started designing my character, a South African huntress, who is based on Overwatch worldview. At this time, I was particularly confident and believed that I could draw well, so I didn’t ask teammate for suggestions when drawing the sketch, and I made a big mistake.
Process
Last week, I drew a sketch of the character. We can find that Maha doesn’t wear a lot, this is to allow her to move quickly. Second, she has some small African objects all over her body, which can increase the charm of her character. Third, her feet may have mechanical devices to match her skills. Of course, these details are simply expressed, and may have to be adjusted.
I first draw the sketch. Then draw the formal character, and then color it. Finally I showed the silhouette. At this time, I still had information in particular, so I gave it to Yann and wanted him to make some comments.
Yann said that my silhouette is not bad, but he feels that my character lacks technological elements, and the character feels very thin. Because my character as a hunter should look very strong, I didn’t show it. He showed me some pictures and suggested that I draw a silhouette first.
Yann said: Her body structure can feel that she is a very strong and persevering person, making people feel like a boxer or something. Now your character has no obvious physical structure. Since she is a melee or a two-handed weapon, you must either enlarge her weapon or strengthen her upper body strength.
By the way, he showed me how other people made silhouettes, and now I know what I need to do:
1. Make the character more three-dimensional.
2. Change the silhouette of the character.
First of all, I went to watch some videos about how the character of Overwatch was designed.
For example, from the silhouette, Tracer’s legs are very thin and long, indicating that she may be a fast runner. Contrastively, Rein’s silhouette looks huge, even he is holding a hammer, which also tells us what weapon he used to attack the enemy.
In addition, I also searched for character designs drawn by others.
This is a silhouette I drew directly. I used A-pose so that the character looks extra powerful. And weapons are also highlighted.
So I drew the second version of the draft, and then traced the lines. Originally, I didn’t want to draw the chest armor, but the characters did not seem to belong to Overwatch. I had to open the game, observe the characteristics of each character’s armor, and then adjust my design. I found that this is really a huge amount of work. When you draw a small object, you will think: What does it look like? It does not fit the cultural background. For this you need to find new information, but some cultures are not very common, so it is not very easy to find.
After drawing a picture, I also designed three views, which is convenient for me to model. The carapace is my first design. I hope she can have a device to support her collision when she uses the ultimate, so I designed this.
Finally, it is very interesting. I want to design the character’s skill icons. Since I want to design an African character, I should show some African elements in it. But unfortunately, I don’t seem to be doing very well. After I finished drawing, I asked friends who hadn’t seen my design. They said that they could understand the meaning of icons. I think this is enough.
I can express my thoughts and reference, because I am not a professional graphic designer, I can only make reference to the existing character icons of Overwatch.
For example, in my berserk darts, I imitated Genji, soldier and Lucio. I didn’t know how to draw her ultimate icon before, until I saw Lucio’s frog icon and Dva’s rabbit icon. It happened that my character was like a cheetah, so I drew it as a cheetah. My teammates find it very cool.
What’s more interesting is that I found that girls prefer my first design, but boys prefer the second one. But in order to be more like overwatch-style, I still chose the second edition.
Conclusion
This week I really have been worrying about how to draw my character. I shouldn’t have any drawing experience before this. Fortunately, my teammate told me the right way and actively gave me their feedback. In this week, I learned how to design my own game characters from silhouettes, how to draw precise machine parts, and more importantly, I gained experience in creating characters while consulting information. This is really not easy.