I always thought that making a character design is one of the funniest jobs in animation. You give life to the characters, creating a whole image in the eyes of the audience. If you are lucky enough, and the story reaches more people, millions around the work will know your work: fans will want to have it on everything from their backpack to their toothbrush. Little did I know that actually, coming up with a design would be one of the most challenging and time-consuming exercises I would encounter during my first term.
Let me introduce you to Damon – a lovely demon, working in the family business of burning people in Hell. Unlike any other demonic creature, Damon has a gentle soul, and his aspirations in life are far more different than his family would wish to. In essence, Damon dreams of becoming a professional ice skater.
Since at the end of Unit 1, we submit only the final version of the project, I decided to share all stages my lovely demon went through. Even though I quite like the design I have at the moment, it is still work in progress, and I intend to improve it over the next couple of months.
I drew my initial inspiration from old medieval drawings of demons. I started researching the different types of demons in Hell and their hierarchy. I wanted my character to be someone with little to no power, whose job is tiring and endless. Then, I found the “Ukobach” demon. According to Jacques Auguste Simon Collin de Plancy in the Dictionnaire Infernal from 1818, Ukobach or Urobach is a “demon of an inferior order.” A creature with big eyes and flaming body, holding a hot pan full of coils. More information I found in Demonicpedia (yes, that’s super creepy). There the demon is described as “goofy” and “incredibly thin” with ample head and a huge nose.
At first, I wanted to make Damon small and cute:
Then, I started thinking more about the personality of my character and how it could reflect in the way he looks. I decided to use the primary image from Dictionnaire Infernal as a reference. To show his unhealthy lifestyle – the man is burning people all night – after all, I decided to make him quite unfit with a belly and baggy butt, but at the same time with pointy elbows and knees. So after days of working on my character design; eventually, my project looked like that:
Leaving the project aside for a couple of months game me a new perspective on it. I decided to improve the backgrounds as I redrew them and set on a new color palette, keeping only the initial concept. Looking at the turnaround, I saw that the 3/4 pose does not fit the others as it shows a different mood, and I can use it for character exploration in the future. I also added additional drawings, so I could animate the turnaround and make it look smooth.
The final version of my character design, which I will submit for Unit 1 looks like this:
What will happen to Damon next? Will he have the courage to follow his dreams and fight for what he loves? Tune in next week to find out.
Bread and butter (I should cut on carbs soon),
Nikol