Character Design

The first inspirational artist that can assist my character design is an Italian illustrator, Alida Massari. She mainly acquires her inspiration from ancient art like old architecture details which as a result making her work of art “modern but with ancient atmosphere”. Most of her work produces in acrylic color, water color, and collage (Children’s illustrators, n.d.).

Her style is using a simple shape with rough and uneven texture but with the help of shape which are organic, curvaceous make her texture looks rough but feels smooth. The color she mostly uses in her work is vibrant with variety of gradient which make her painting unique and fits with her style. The proportion she uses for her characters is distorted and elongated which make her characters fanciful and imaginary and it enhances the uniqueness of her style. From these kinds of element that she uses, it makes her characters in every work came out very gentle, delicate and creates swirling and flowing movement like fairy tale.

These elements become the inspiration to design my own character but I want my character to have a feeling of someone who is fake and unreal so I followed the way she make the shape of her characters distorted but with a bit of angular shape. In this way, it makes my character more stiff and strong and also makes my character seems like she has a rough life, not a princess in fairy tale. At the same time, a very straight line and angular shape can express out the personality

of my character which seems like a boring person if we tell from her appearance. By analyzing each elements that Alida uses to create the uniqueness to her work, I found that her style can be a good inspiration to design my character especially the texture because my character made out of a simple line and shape so I would like to concentrate more on the texture and my goal is to using one plain color for each character and to make that plain color more interesting I need to create the texture within the color, and the way she painted her character is a good inspiration and useful example for my design.

Another inspirational artist for designing my character is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Most of his work played with the distorted shape of the subject in drawings. The line he used was simple but it excellently presented the exact shape of the objects which are organic, curvaceous, angular, and elongated. The tone of his works is contrasting and dramatic which clearly represents his style which is German expressionism (Borteh, 2011). The color he mostly used was bold, vibrant and unnatural colors. The overall look of most of his works create swirling, flowing and dramatic movement.

One thing that I like the most about Kirchner is the distorted shape which I want to use it as my inspiration for designing my character. I found that the way he made people in his drawing look very distorted convey messages in it. Even though these people look fake from their proportion, but the curve line and elongated proportion give the feeling and personality in each person.

For example, Five Women on the Street (1913) although these five women were drawn in a simple line, each one expressed different personality especially the second from the left. By looking at her shape and pose, it presents that this woman is arrogant and very proud of herself. This is a very good inspiration for me because I need to make one character to look completely different so by changing the shape of the design, it can give the new personality to my character.

As a result from researching the artists, I combined the style of shape and form from Alida Massari and Kirchner to create the shape of my character, and the color with variety of gradient as seen in Alida’s painting style as my references and inspiration for the color palette and texture.

Children illustrators. (n.d.). Alida Massari. Professional children’s illustrator. Retrieved January 19, 2013 from Children’s illustrators http://www.childrensillustrators.com/illustrator-details/AMassari/id=2203/

Borteh, L. (2011). The art story:. Retrieved January 19,2013 from http://www.theartstory.org/artist-kirchner-ernst-ludwig.htm