Character Design
Alitonia
November 2012
The purpose of this project was to create a character which would be used in future projects, such as my Fairy Jigsaw Puzzle. This character design started on paper, and was then created in Adobe Illustrator CS6.
Interesting Parts
- The stripes on the fairy's sleeves are drawn within the arm, so they can be fully animated without breaking the exterior line of the sleeve.
- I recently recreated the head of this Fairy in Java (through Processing), in order to better understand how the bezier() and bezierVertex() methods work.
- This was built as a fully vector graphic, and so can be scaled to any size, without loss of quality.
What I learned
- I learned how to use the shape builder tool to combine and subtract shapes to create more complex graphics.
- Creating symbols in Illustrator helped me to maintain consistency between repeating sections of the character e.g. eyelashes.
- I gained great confidence in using the pen tool in Illustrator, along with the convert vertex tool, in order to outline specific shapes or sections of the character.
