Art + Design
Prompted Design: Character & Interior
For this assignment, each student in the class got randomly assigned a pair of antonyms. Our task was to take these words and create a character whose outward appearance suggested one thing, but whose actual personality was quite the opposite.
My prompt words? "Muscular" and "wimp" — two concepts that aren't exactly equals when it comes to being purposed both ways. (Who could describe one's personality as "muscular"?) Still, I challenged myself to iterate in both directions.
Here are the three character concepts I presented to the class as my contenders for the final illustration, as well as my final interior design I went with for the character I selected in the end.
A gentle giant
My very first crack at the assignment prompt. I remember being totally smitten with his concept when I first came up with it, but I found that every character I came up with after him wound up being my new favorite.
Still, I love Barley dearly! He is very much a Ferdinand character: timid, not very quick to fight. I figured it would be cute to present not only a physically strong, but traditionally fearsome creature (the minotaur) as vulnerable. The reasoning? He never met his parents, and was brought up in the woods by a community of pixies! (Bug-sized people don't make fantastic self-defense coaches, I imagine.)
Sweet meets savage
While ultimately I didn't go with this concept one for my final, I have a lot of attachment to Lacie. I based her design off of my little cousin Katie, who has the cutesiest sense of style and is into really morbid horror stuff at a young age.
I was excited about this concept because of the setting I would have drawn her in for her final illustrative piece. I was going to depict her in her bedroom, which would have be decorated all childish and cutesy, juxtaposed against darker elements eluding to her werewolf nature (such as desperate claw marks on the walls and a steel muzzle hanging up on her closet door).
Fearsome forest protector
My final pick for the subject of the larger character-in-a-scene piece.
Tarry Grove is an enchanted forest haven for all sorts of creatures... and unfortunately, it lives right next door to a human kingdom full of poachers.
Madam Rhu is their first line of defense. With her bark-and-plant fiber suit of muscle armor, she stands at the height of a colossal golem, and has weaponized the terrifying person as a sort of boogeyman character that keeps the humans out. Those that choose to venture into the forest anyway are met with the full might of her druidic magicks.
Final Illustration
