My overall design plan

After all of my visual research I have created a brief visual and design plan for myself.

Visual Style Plan 
How I want my characters and my paintings to look like.

• Sharpness style of silhouette from Ashley Wood
• Drastic and unnatural proportions from Bob Rafei 
• Rendering style of DOTA 2 

 Design Plan
How am I going to create my characters and what techniques will I use.

• The use of silhouettes, sketches, thumb nails, paintings etc
• Designing from the inside out - Skillful Huntsman 
• Value painting and experimenting with colour 
• Lots of happy accidents  

The Skillful Huntsman

I've recently read the Skillful Huntmans by Scott Robertson, Felix Yoon, Mike Yamada and Khang Le. There are some aspects in this book which I find interesting and want to include in my work for this project such as the work of Mike Yamada where he takes his silhouettes a step further by putting them into photoshop and painting over the top of them in white, creating many different characters with each silhouette. There are many other techniques I've learned from this book such as the Lost line technique and the importance of the characters pose and clothing them right for purpose etc. 

I want to use these techniques throughout my project to help create individual and unique characters. 

"Most young designers don't realise that graphic design is a huge part of entertainment design. At the core of designing anything visual, you can always start with the proportions of the objects silhouettes and then move inward by adding the graphics." 

       - Scott Robertson 

Looking at the design of already existing Heroes and Villains

Here are some mood boards with some annotation of mostly game characters and one or two film characters analysing their design. The first mood boards if on the heroes and the second is on the villains.
Overall there are some interesting finds, such as the triangle mostly added to villains to create danger and fear within the design can also be incorporated into the heroes designs too. Its the same with circles added into villains design.

Heroes

Villains

Final Visual Test

Here is my final test in visual research where I tried to combine all 3 artists. I'm planning on taking inspiration of all the artists starting with the sharpness of silhouette from Ashley Wood, the character proportions of Bob Rafei and the rendering style of DOTA 2.

Below I've used another one of Ashley Wood's characters and started to render it with value patterning like in the DOTA Visual Style guide. I plan to use this approach when creating my own character designs for this project to help me get a sense of where I want my viewers eyes to go as well as the first step of rendering.      

Below are the final rendered artworks I made where I blended the value patterning by painting it in - no blend tool! - and then started to add colour overlays etc. The one thing I feel I've failed in here is trying to convey more colour in the final render. Even though a lot of DOTA's works have a one main colour with two complementary colours lightly added in, I feel like I struggled a bit to get this to come across. This is however, something that I can easily work on and evolve throughout this project.

Overall, I feel like I've come to an end with my visual research and that I've got a comfortable mix of influences of the 3 artists. My next step will be to move on and start creating my own designs and applying everything I've learned from my visual research into my designs.

Coloured Ashley Wood and DOTA 2 design and visual style

For this colour test I used the DOTA's Visual Style guide and continued on from my drawing on my last post. I firstly blended all the value patterning together so there wasn't any sharp lines or value etc. I then started adding colour on top of my image keeping in mind that there should be some level of high saturation of colour on top of the character and very little towards the bottom like the visual style guide says.
I've chosen my 3 colours by taking them from the original artwork, brown being the most dominant colour in the painting with red a close second. There are also hints of a green in the painting too which I used to dot around my own interpretation of it.

Overall I have learnt a great deal from doing these studies and visual tests, some of the techniques I've learned I will continue to use throughout this module and in my own personal artworks too. The next and final visual research will be to try and create the final look for this module that I can take and carry on to create the final character designs that the client will love.

Value Patterning an Ashley Wood's character design in the style of DOTA 2

Here is my first step into creating one of Ashley Wood's characters into a DOTA 2 style. I've been using DOTA's visual style guide to help me create this first step in exploring DOTA's style.
With this I started with the value patterning making sure not to use any absolute whites or blacks and started establishing contrasting blocks of value to highlight the characters form.
I also added the value gradient to create more visual interest by having the upper parts of the character the lightest and the darkest towards the bottom of the character.
Doing this before adding colour will help to make sure the character is recognisable and the most important features draw the eye of the viewer which is why I intend to use this technique for my own designs in this project.  

The next step I will take with this painting will be adding more detail and colour to it taking information from DOTA's visual style guide and create the colour schemes to help me with colouring this character.

DOTA 2 Visual Style Guide

Here are some screenshots I've taken from the DOTA 2 Visual Style guide. I've taken screenshots of what would help me the most in terms of character design in 2D as there was some slides on 3D modelling which wouldn't be appropriate here in this blog. The slides speak for themselves and I intend to take what I've learned to help me creating a Ashley Wood character in the style of DOTA 2 as well as creating my own character designs for this brief. 

What I noticed the most was the use of gradient in DOTA's designs which I didn't notice before as well as the colour palettes and wheels which will most certainly help me further on in this module. There is a lot I can take from this visual style guide such as the value gradient, colour schemes and mixing items for each character.