{"id":303,"date":"2017-05-24T10:03:49","date_gmt":"2017-05-24T10:03:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.avivor.com\/english\/?p=303"},"modified":"2017-05-24T14:30:10","modified_gmt":"2017-05-24T14:30:10","slug":"objectifying-characters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.avivor.com\/english\/?p=303","title":{"rendered":"Objectifying Characters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Much has changed in the year+ since the last post. Well, not MUCH, but one big thing: I’m now a full-time freelance illustrator! My website<\/a> got a small renovation, which this blog and my Facebook Page should probably share at some point, but if I waited with updates until that was done, well, it might have been another year before the next post.<\/p>\n

The reason I decided to become self-employed is that – while I really enjoyed working on Viber sticker packs and being part of that awesome team – I wanted to branch out and do some different things as well. After a little more than a month “on the job”, I can happily say that I’m doing just that.<\/p>\n

One project I recently started is an illustration for “A Town with Pep<\/a>“, an indie RPG from Richard Williams. It’s the first in several projects Richard commissioned, which is great because a) they’re all different and interesting, each in its own way; b) Richard is a client who knows what he wants, knows how to convey that, and still leaves a lot of the creative “reins” in my hands and c) he’s totally cool with me sharing my work in progress. Which is what’s happening now.<\/p>\n

A Town with Pep<\/h4>\n

“A Town with Pep” is a “Teen mystery drama in small-town America”. Think Riverdale in RPG form. Richard commissioned a title illustration featuring 5 teenagers – examples of the characters one might play – and he gave me complete freedom in designing them. But, since complete freedom paralyses me artistically, I asked him to give me some character design “seeds” in the same way a player would start creating a character in the game: picking an object that symbolises the character. Richard sent me these five images of everyday objects. As a little exercise, see what kinds of characters come to your mind before reading on to see my interpretations.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Looking at the objects, I started getting ideas for some of them, and collected references that came to mind from various media (mainly TV). I often do that when coming up with characters for roleplaying games as well, probably because I watch ALL the television and that’s just what my mental library is composed of. After getting a more or less solid idea of each character I drew a quick sketch for each. Are they anything like what you imagine when looking at the objects?<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

The next step was tackling the composition of the image. Richard gave me a good reference shot (from Riverdale<\/a> actually), and I tried two takes on it:<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

#1 was approved, and I moved on to pencilling the scene. During feedback on the first draft, Richard got the idea of showing a “missing” sixth teenager made up of negative space. I like it because it makes the composition more interesting, as well as playing into the sense of mystery this game is all about. Here’s the approved pencil stage.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

That’s where we got to so far. Work in progress, whoo!<\/p>\n

Aviv<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Much has changed in the year+ since the last post. Well, not MUCH, but one big thing: I’m now a full-time freelance illustrator! My website got a small renovation, which this blog and my Facebook Page should probably share at some point, but if I waited with updates until that was done, well, it might have been another year before …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,29,14],"tags":[33,52],"class_list":["post-303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-illustration","category-sketches-and-wip","category-work","tag-character-design","tag-roleplaying"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.avivor.com\/english\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.avivor.com\/english\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.avivor.com\/english\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.avivor.com\/english\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.avivor.com\/english\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=303"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.avivor.com\/english\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310,"href":"https:\/\/www.avivor.com\/english\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions\/310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.avivor.com\/english\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.avivor.com\/english\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.avivor.com\/english\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}