First Character Design Project

Research

So for this project I will be doing a bit of Character Design. I have chosen to do a dragon warrior princess.... OK so it is not the most imaginative of characters but it will do for my first character design.

As research for this project I have been looking at a few types of dragons to get a basic view of their body shape and certain characteristics that they may have. 

Here are a few good images that I came across and links to the websites I found them on so you can take a look yourself:

http://www.draconika.com/types.php

http://library.thinkquest.org/04oct/01925/Comparing%20dragons.html

http://www.draconika.com/types.php

I decided to look at picture of warriors and women to see who I preferred my character to look like. I think that Natalie Portman has lovely facial features and looks very feminine so I looked for a few pictures of her.

Here is my characters profile which helped me decide on how I wanted her to look.

Character profile

  
Name: Feira
Sex: Female
Age: 22 years old

Physical description:
Half dragon, half princess. Long nails to claw at enemies, sharp teeth, can breath fire every so often. Her tail has sharp bones like spikes on the end to attack, she has big pointed ears for excellent hearing. Wings to fly during battle. Claws as feet for balance and grip.

Strength and weaknesses:
Incredibly fast and agile, can fly, very good fighter.
She has a kind heart that could be seen as a weakness.

Background story:
Feira is a princess and trained warrior. Her father (the king) was away from the kingdom on a quest. Whilst he was away he made the drastic mistake of slaying a baby dragon to get to his final destination. The mother of the baby dragon saw what the king did to her precious baby and followed the king back to his castle to get revenge. She turned the kings daughter into a creature that was half human, half dragon. She was seen as a monster and banished from the kingdom. Feira now on her own travels the world to find the dragon and see if the dragons magic can be broken so that she can go back home.

Time to scribble down a few character designs 

I had a little think of how I wanted my character to be, her background history and her personality, if she had any special skills. I drew a few designs where she was full of scales like a dragon but then decided that it might look a little too much so just put the scales in certain places on her body. I did the sketches in a sketchbook with no colour until I decided how I wanted my character to look. 

First of all I decided what shape I wanted her skull and face to be. How long her hair should be, eye shape, nose and where I wanted her scales to be.

Then I started to design her body, with scales, without, how her clothes should look. If she should have wings or not, how her feet and hands should look. How much of a dragon I actually wanted her to look.

 Then I focused on her emotions, what she would look like in certain situations. from her face with no emotion to angry, happy, her face from the side, breathing fire, being sad and smiling.

I chose to do scales on one side of her face to show what she would have looked like when she was a princess, before the dragon cursed her.

This is the back of her when I decided not to do scales all over her body but just in certain areas instead and what she would look like with her wings tucked away.

I did do more character designs in colour in photoshop but unfortunately my laptop crashed then broke and I lost it all so for now I will put this post up and then update it when I have redone my character designs. 

Toodlepip for now.