Cold and Bored: Part One
This is my first purely digital work for a number of years, so the start of this project has been an excellent opportunity to reaffirm what I learnt during my degree. The character style is principally influenced by Raymond Briggs who has been a major source of inspiration for most of my previous projects.
Base character plate
The above is my first digital drawing for many years, so there are a few areas of improvement such as shading. However, I am happy with the level it is at though I have already started to amend and improve on the character plate in my painting software.
I wanted to capture that organic feel that handmade illustrations have, referring back to Raymond Briggs's work, I focused on trying to imbue fabrics with a gradient of colours to give them some depth, using a variety of brushes to make those fabrics and skin more engaging for the eye.
Once this was finished, I moved this over to Blender, where, again for the first time I worked with PBR textures. I placed the character plate in a 3D environment I composed and then experimented with some different render settings and scene colours.
First Renders:
Overall, the beginning of this project has been a success, I have certainly learnt a lot.
The goal is to develop something with a lot of atmosphere, somewhere between a small scene-let and a book illustration, like a loop. The next stages will involve developing new textures for the environment in a more 'handmade' style as it will compliment the design of the character better, though I will explore how this integrates with the PBR method of texturing.
