Protagonist Development

After playing around in my sketchbook I decided to start taking my designs and ideas into photoshop and start playing around digitally. Some of these sheets look a little messy but being messy is what Iam best at and I love to just get on with my ideas and get them all drawn up!


Here I have put together a bunch of quick silhouettes, from what I've researched and drawn up in my sketchbooks. The style/body shape I have gone for is similar to that of the Jak and Daxter female characters, I want the proportions to keep quite cartoonish but not too far, so the character is still recognisable as a female.

Even though these silhouettes are quite simple and maybe not immediately eye catching, I wanted to play around with the aspects of the character. Like colour and accessories, also the whole background/what kind of character it is. Which I think I can demonstrate in other ways, rather than with the silhouette in this case.

Something which I explore later on in the development process.

I took some of my favourite designs forward and drew more detail into them. I was going for a gothic, voodoo, warrier, magician type of character and I hope that has come through with my designs. I think it has!

I continued to play around more with some ideas and to see what I liked best, what I wanted to carry forward. Since this character is the Protagonist, I was pretty keen to use the colour green throughout the design, as I feel the colour green has connotations to positive things. Also because the character is to be a magical, mystical type creation I also wanted to incorporate positive energy (through the orbs) which again I think green is a good colour to use for this and to demonstrate this. 

This is my final character design (roughly). 

My whole idea behind her (yet to be named) is that she is a gothic voodoo priestess, the gun she carries is a magical orb firing gun. The orbs however can only be handled by herself, anything or anyone else they touch brings almost imminent death. She is a strong, independent character, not afraid of the horrors she may face. 

Here, with my chosen design (which I continued to edit and change around from the previous design), I started playing around with different colour palettes. Obviously less is more with any design, so I tired to bare that in mind. I also wanted to keep saturated colours to a minimum. With black/grey/white being the main colours to this design.