Damp – Character Development

I was unsure about what sort of detail to go into with the character, but I’m letting intuition guide me for once. This is what my heart wants to do!

I took a look at the drawn characters from original Paddington, and through tearful eyes (he’s just so loveable, isn’t he?) I took photographs.

I like the black lines, and the way they move. They’re traditionally drawn, and my experiments were traditional – but I may have to make the character digital to save a LOT of pain in terms of overlaying her as a transparent asset.

Below are my experiments.

Looking at them now, I’m really responding to the pink and yellow one. I think it’s really bright, and that’s the effect I want to contrast the mental picture I have of the blue-grey room.

Antonia is a charismatic and energetic person, and I want to highlight that in her colour palette to show that these sorts of problems can happen to anyone. And when she loses her saturation at the end, the point I’ll be making is that getting stuck in endless legal loops and being forced to live in a place like that can just suck the life out of you. Anyone reading this may be wondering if I’m mary-sueing about my shower problems, and if I am, so what?! Call me Ken Loach for all these statements I’m making about society and The System.

Then I took an image of Antonia sitting on the bed and repeated it three times using my iPad as a really general light box. I overlaid them, coloured them quickly digitally to save time, and had a go at creating a boil.

The boil is quite harsh. Another reason to work digitally with the character is that I can trace directly over the images and get a more streamlined, less noticeable movement. I do also accept that I’ll be losing something with the digital images, so I might make my reference images traditionally, to keep that physicality and flowing hand and ink movements.

The next movements will be making some mould textures in my sketchbook, and pinning down the set. If I’m doing Antonia digitally, I might spend the extra effort on keeping the set traditional.