Designing your Character Lineup

Alright, so up to now we have really been concentrating on individual characters.  you have had numerous assignments to help you learn the basic principles of great character design and hopefully you  have continued to polish your characters as you learned new principles to make them more effective and appealing to your audience.

for the next week and a half of this semester, we will be concentrating on how your characters work as a whole unit by doing a character lineup.  It is important that, even in designing varied characters, that they can believably coexist in the same world and interact with each other (as usual, this applies to any field, whether film, comic books, illustration, video games etc.) The goal here is to show off each of your characters, lined up side by side.  A good character lineup will be a very fast read to even an un artistic audience. showing their respective sizes, shapes, colors and contrasting elements, the viewer should be able to quickly and accurately understand the personality of your character and their purpose in this story or world (villain, hero, love interest, shy, magical, poor, rich etc.).

We have done 5 characters from the Prydain chronicles this semester: you will choose your strongest 4 for your lineup. - These will also be in COLOR

1) Assignment #1-  Fflewder Fflam
2) Assignment #3 -  2 characters from your silhouettes (Taran, Eilonwy, Dalben, Doli)
3) Assignment #6 - Villain (Horned King, one of the 3 witches, Cauldron Born)
4) Assignment #7 - Animal (Henwen, Gurgi)

we have also done heads on Taran, Eilonwy, Dalben, Doli and Gwydion (Assignment #4).

You may choose any of these characters to display in your line-up.
If, for your final lineup you decide to do different characters or styles than you did for your assignments you will still be expected to display a professional level of design and finish.  Grades for this final assignment will be based on the cohesiveness and craftmanship of the lineup. (credit for individual redone/polished characters will go towards their respective assignments to improve your initial grade for that assignment)

all 4 characters in your lineup should show the same high level of professionalism, design, and finish.  This is your FINAL.  it is essential that there be no obvious anatomical errors, unfinished or neglected parts to your work.  The final lineup will also be in color.

Quick Schedule: November 27th and 29th will be primarily spent on working on your designs and to get help from me if you have any Q's (anatomy, folds, shapes etc.)  December 4th everyone will post their WIP lineup for the last time before the final critique.  December 6th will be the last day of class and the critique for the character lineup.  All redos on past assignments, extra credit for this block, artist essays etc. are due at our final on Dec 11th.
our final on Tuesday Dec 11th will be in room 2104 JKB from 8-10.  Attendance is mandatory.

Various tips:

 Make sure that your two characters are proportional to each other—they should be from the same “world” (features, anatomy etc.)

Think about how your characters will interact, both physically and emotionally, and make sure that your designs can accommodate that.

you can use guide lines in the background to show off various proportions

you may want to ground your characters by a simple ground plane or by showing simple shadows.  this may be essential if you have floating characters - 

in short - whatever it takes to SELL your characters to the audience.

Here are some examples of effective lineups: