Nano Pirates - HAND IN -

Joseph Shaw
P13202443
P13202443@myemail.dmu.ac.uk
Project title: Nano Pirates

For this project, the brief tasked me to design 12 miniature pirate characters based around the idea of the burrowers; small people that live in and around the house.

For me, having to create 12 unique character designs in a three week period proved to be a difficult task. This was mainly because I had to spend a lot of time thinking about overall design and shape language, having each character be unique from one another yet still be a part of a cohesive whole. I started out by creating a collection of initial thumbnails to work from. I worked these up one by one, sketching rough linework over the top. As I progressed through the project I would constantly go back and revisit the concepts. In order to sell the idea that they were small I tried to give visual queues in the form of small household items that they could improvise as tools or weapons. Their clothing is patched together from scraps or found fabric.

I kept in mind that this project had to be highly stylised. This helped a lot when trying to create visual contrast between the characters. I used a lot of contrasting shapes within the characters designs, thinking about primitive shapes as a basis such triangles, squares and circles. I used a lot of thin to thick design language in the characters anatomy and clothing, placing emphasis on areas where a characters body transitioned from thin to thick such as at the joints and pivotal areas of the body. When it came to colour, I used very simple block colours with a clipping mask over the top to block in shadows. This gives a solid shadow and is an effective way to quickly imply lighting and volume.

In hindsight 12 characters over three weeks doesn't sound like a lot of work, however the hardest part of this project by far was trying to come up with solid character designs that used good shapes and were each distinguishable from each other. I spent a lot of time struggling with trying to make the characters unique in some way. Having the characters be highly stylised definitely helped to push that contrast. I would definitely have liked to have invested more time to exploring and generating more ideas as opposed to sticking firmly to initial concepts.

elow are the characters again with some slight revisions made during week 10