Character Design / Projects

21/4/2025 - 30/7/2025/ Week 1 - Week 14

GUAN YAXIN / 0370687

Character Design / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media

LECTURES

All lectures completed in exercise

INTRODUCTION

In the first week of class, Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi first introduced the course to us and explained the requirements, which gave me a preliminary understanding of this course. We need to set a new role in the specified world view (just like designing oc), draw an image and write a background story. We need to prepare an electronic drawing board for the next study.

In the following time, Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi explained the concept of "painting style" according to PPT, and used a character in Cookie Run: Ovenbreak to demonstrate for us, drawing the same image in different styles. Understanding these can make us make better designs, and students are also required to complete this exercise. I didn't expect to have painting contact in the first class, so I wasn't prepared. I feel very embarrassed that I don't have any tools to draw with me, but I have no choice but to take action, so I can only draw on the memo of my mobile phone with my fingers. This process is very difficult. I can only watch some twisted lines appear on the screen. What's worse, the memo can't save all the images I have drawn. This is so desperate that I can only finish this exercise after class. Regarding the world view of role design, the teacher gave three different games for students to choose, and the one with the most votes was the determined project, and finally the Genshin Impact was selected. But to be honest, I prefer the Zenless Zone Zero to Genshin Impact (of course,  Genshin Impact is also good). Out of interest, maybe I can use some extra time to design oc of the Zenless Zone Zero.

Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi asked the students to do research on the game, determine the area where the characters are located to facilitate the design, and make an outline of the character design before the next class. I set the region in Liyue, and then drew several different and simple drafts. I like making up stories very much, and the role design just provides an opportunity. When drawing a draft, some plots naturally emerge in my mind. I position the role of the design as an artist (at least a worker related to the art industry). This role is set in contrast and looks different from usual. However, in the following time, I conceived two different characters, a man and a woman, both of whom are teenagers. Their background stories are not the same, but they are similar from a certain point of view, so I decided to design two different images and choose the better one in the process of perfection to complete the follow-up tasks. At the same time, I also finished drawing the exercises that I didn't finish in class before.

In the course of the second week, Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi explained some more in-depth knowledge, such as different characters, how to write background stories and so on, and also showed us the role design in the original god of the game. The next time is painting practice in class. This time, the teacher takes a female model as an example to teach us how to sketch characters step by step. First, we need to locate and determine the positions of the head, shoulders and so on, then summarize the body of the characters, and finally erase the excess parts inside, and use soft lines to show the muscles of the characters in the drawing process. She told us that if we design a female character, we should draw the female model given in the folder, and if we design a male character, we should draw the male model given in the folder. This exercise can help us understand the structure of the human body. In class, some students showed the outline of their characters to the teacher. Before that, I thought it was enough to draw a draft, so I needed to supplement the keywords, design concepts and reference pictures of the characters and submit them to Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi for inspection.

In the third week, the teacher still explained some professional knowledge: how to design characters. There are usually different types of characters, which can be used to design. Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi showed a variety of different character designs in PPT, and introduced the process of character design. At the same time, she emphasized the importance of shape design through silhouette. In this lesson, our practice is to draw silhouettes of people, whose occupations can be wizards, knights, scholars and so on. We need to draw characters' costumes, accessories, etc. in black, white and gray to highlight their occupation/identity. Drawing these makes me feel a little confused. Because of my own reasons, I usually don't shape the picture in depth, and I basically stay in the draft stage every time, so the draft can't be closed in general. It's a little difficult for me to draw silhouette of characters, but I'm trying to make my lines smooth, smooth and closed. In this class, Miss Ayunie Juanie Arzmi also demonstrated for us. I like watching her paint very much. Miss Ayunie Juanie Arzmi paints fast and well, and I like her style of painting. By using the mirror tool, we can draw symmetrical figures. This time, we need to continue to complete our task 1 and draw A pose so that we can draw the appearance of the figures more intuitively (clothes and hairstyles, etc.) and make subsequent choices. In this week's classroom exercise, I brought a pen and paper to finish the exercise, but the teacher reminded me to use the drawing board, because our course is closely related to it, and she also needs to know everyone's level. To tell the truth, I'm nervous. Drawing in the presence of many people makes me feel a little uncomfortable, but I should overcome this.I drew some sketches of characters.

Before class this week, I showed Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi the mood board of two characters I designed before. She chose male characters, but in the process of drafting, I found that I was better at designing female characters than male characters, so I explained this to the teacher in class. She agreed that I would continue to design female characters, and also gave feedback on my current draft. However, Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi doesn't seem to have a particularly favorite image, but the image and direction of the characters in the current period are roughly determined.

 I just need to continue to improve the draft and give feedback to the teacher. According to the students' examples given by Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi in the teams file, I wrote the background of the characters and design concepts I had conceived before, so as to prepare for the submission of task 1.

Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi explained some suggestions of designing characters according to the PPT she prepared, such as color matching, creative sources, reproducibility and so on. At the same time, we also learned the general idea and process of designing characters, which is very helpful for our character design. This week's class exercise is to design characters according to objects (that is, to design characters by referring to them). Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi's demonstration is very beautiful, and I also chose two objects for character design.For the first character, I transformed the butterfly decoration on the object into the mask on my face and the decoration on my skirt; For the second character, I refer to the original article and use a lot of thorns and spikes in her clothing design.

According to the advice given by Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi, I drew different costume designs for her to help me choose, and the teacher also gave feedback. 

She said that these designs were much better than those shown to her last week, and also gave suggestions for revision. She said that I need to add more details to the costume design. In the next time, I will make further revisions according to the suggestions given by the teacher. For the text content written before, I have continued to improve. Especially the story of the role, I have deleted and supplemented it in order to clarify the role's experience more clearly and concisely.

The fifth week is an online course. Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi showed us different facial expressions and different angles of the characters' heads. At the same time, this is also the content of our classroom practice. This week is the submission time of task 1, but I know I still need to improve it. According to the previous student cases, I also drew more costume designs, and let the teacher make the final choice. 

In two days, I need to complete all the contents of task1. Because the teacher has not completely defined the image of the characters before, so far, I still have a role turnover to draw. After Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi's selection, I made some changes in this final image and drew the role turnover. 

Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi also reminded me to pay attention to adding patterns on clothes. I drew different patterns and compared them to choose the right pattern. 

For the coat, I also drew patterns.

Finally, I finished task 1. After uploading it to the folder, I checked my task 1 again, and found that when I was drawing the silhouette of a character, there were some small flaws because the line sketch was not closed. I had time and should take a break, but they didn't seem to affect the whole.

Starting from the sixth week, we will be completing task 2. Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi, I have uploaded a new student case to the classroom folder for our reference and viewing. At this stage, there are many things we need to draw, so we need to speed up and improve efficiency even more. In this week's class, the teacher explained the principle of perspective and some techniques for drawing characters, such as using dynamic lines and practicing drawing from multiple angles. This classroom exercise also involved sketching from different angles based on the portrait reference provided by the teacher. Unlike the classroom exercises in the second week, the reference images provided this time have larger motion amplitudes and unique angles, with some images having obvious perspective and stronger tension.

Before the start of this week's class, I practiced drawing character expressions based on last week's content. Based on this content, I also started drawing the part about depicting character expressions in Task 2. During the drawing process, I felt very painful, especially when I couldn't use symmetrical drawing. In fact, my drawing skills are not very good and my abilities are limited, so I rely very much on my "hand feel". When the hand feel is good, my drawing process is relatively easy, the lines are smoother, and the final effect is relatively better. However, if the hand feel is not good, my lines will be very stiff, and the final picture effect will not be good. But for such difficulties encountered, I must find ways to overcome them, because I need to constantly improve.

During this period of time, I drew some pictures about character movements and role vertical drawing as an exercise. I think they may be used in the follow-up tasks.

In the seventh week of class, the teacher explained to us the relevant knowledge about illustration composition, such as the concept of composition, composition techniques and applications, and so on. For some elements of composition, we need to clarify and understand the concepts, flexibly apply them, in order to draw illustrations with strong storytelling. This week's classroom exercise is to draw simple scenes (individual buildings) and design weapons. Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi once again reminds us of the efficiency issue. Before this week's class, I didn't draw much, just some simple movements. I think I should improve my efficiency again because I have other assignments to do.

The teacher did not further explain the knowledge, but gave us time to continue completing task 2. I added some details to the previously unfinished actions and drew some weapon designs. Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi made a choice among the five different weapons I drew, and she reminded me to make the hilt longer to fit the structure and facilitate grip, as the character needs to use weapons. At the same time, the teacher reminded me that the number of actions I drew was not enough, so I still need to draw others. For the content of task 2, I have also drawn some actions and clothing designs. 

Unfortunately, the teacher doesn't seem particularly satisfied with the clothing I designed. So over the weekend, I drew a lot of costumes for the characters, added details to the weapon design, and completed multiple color combinations for the original character design, hoping that she can choose a satisfactory solution.

Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi gave us a brief explanation of the drawing requirements for character scene portraits. As the deadline for Task 2 was originally in the eighth week, but the teacher postponed it to the ninth week, we need to complete all the tasks this weekend. This week's classroom exercise is to create pixel animations, and we need to use a mouse. The process of drawing character pixels may seem a bit tedious, but the final result is very cute. For the feedback I gave to the teacher in Teams, she chose some of them as the final results.

 On this basis, I made some adjustments. During this period, my efficiency seemed not very high, which caused me a lot of distress, but my top priority was to complete task 2. And I seemed to have deviated from the teacher's requirements before. I thought we might not need to draw the same number of projects as in the student cases, but in reality we had to do so. So over the weekend, I drew a lot of content, such as character turnover (with colors), character clothing turnover (with colors), weapon turnover, and so on.

Due to public holidays, we have no classes this week, so the teacher was unable to provide us with timely feedback. For the standing drawing content of task 3, we need the teacher to choose one of the actions to expand, so I can only collect some information first to prepare for making the mood board.

Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi pointed out that there is no problem with my design, but when coloring, my shadow areas are not very obvious, possibly because I used a brush to apply. For the clothing design, Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi said that the colors I used were a bit too dark. The clothing design theme I chose was butterflies, so I should make the clothing look more like butterflies. She suggested that I could add some spots and make them glow. For character portraits, Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi chose the first option. She said that I could change the right hand in the picture and also adjusted the direction of my clothes and hair to make the movements smoother and more natural. 

At the same time, clothing splitting needs to be labeled with corresponding serial numbers to make them clearer.Following the teacher's advice, I made modifications by adding details to the skirt (white dots) and conducting research on game illustrations.

I added special effects to the character illustrations as game gacha illustrations. But the teacher told us that we need to add a background (i.e. draw character scene portraits). So I added some backgrounds on this basis and drew different character scene portraits.

Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi told me that I can't just draw special effects for characters, which cannot be called background. The final sketch I need to complete should be a character scene sketch, so I can only draw some sketches based on my teacher's advice.

Based on the actions chosen by Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi, and with the addition of character skills and special effects, I created various scene sketches. However, Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi pointed out that my sketches were messy and difficult to see clearly. She said she liked the version with buildings in the background, but at the same time, she thought that I might not be able to complete it well. The teacher suggested that I could choose the background myself, but due to my messy drawings, I could only use colors to indicate the positions in the background and let Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi make the choice.

 In the end, she chose one of the versions and he reminded me to speed up because task 3 is about to close for submission.

As I was not particularly satisfied with the previously drawn character line draft, I have redrawn it to make its dynamic facial expressions more flexible and vivid. And based on this, the depiction of character colors was completed. In the background, I depicted elements such as river water, lotus flowers, mountains, etc., which are in line with the character's color scheme, habits, hobbies, etc. In my setting, she likes to practice martial arts, so sometimes she also practices swordsmanship herself. This character scene portrait depicts this scene. In the task submission of task 3, I conducted research on some character portraits in the game, which can help me better draw character scene portraits. After submitting this task, I will start preparing for the final one.

In the last class, Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi gave an evaluation of the scene portraits I drew. She said that the special effects in the middle of the picture were not very satisfactory and that the light perception should be enhanced. She also demonstrated for me. 

He reminded me to speed up my pace because Sunday is the deadline for task 4.

I made modifications according to Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi's suggestions, changing the shape and color of the special effects and enhancing the sense of light in the picture. The rest is to create the card drawing interface, person ID photos, and layout the previous content. Overall, task 4 is a summary of the previous content. Overall, I have done some finishing work and I feel that my work efficiency has improved.

Task 1: Personification 

Task 2: Character Design Development 

Task3: Character Design Executions

Task4: Character Boards Compilation

FEEDBACK

WEEK 1

General Feedback :The teacher introduced the course to us, explained the concept of "painting style" and so on, and asked us to prepare tools and determine the scope of role design.

Specific Feedback :Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi reminded me to bring an electronic drawing board.

WEEK 2

General Feedback :Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi teaches us how to design characters, and shows some characters in the game as cases. Students need to continue to design oc in Genshin Impact.

Specific Feedback :I need to continue to finish the sketch exercise in class and make a detailed outline of the characters.

WEEK 3

General Feedback :Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi explains the types of role design and how to design roles for us.

Specific Feedback :Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi gave feedback on my draft, and there was no particularly satisfactory figure. I hope I can design some others and remind me to speed up and update the progress of task 1.

WEEK 4

General Feedback :This lesson is about the specific methods of designing characters. Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi teaches us the skills of designing characters. The teacher reminds the students that they need to speed up the completion of task 1 and show her the draft so that she can determine the final design.

Specific Feedback :The teacher checked the draft characters I drew, and selected one as the final display direction, and put forward suggestions for revision. I will continue to improve according to the teacher's choice. But I haven't finished all the drafts yet, so I'm going to send a message to Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi on teams for follow-up feedback.

WEEK 5

General Feedback :The teacher demonstrated how to draw characters' expressions and heads at different angles in class.

Specific Feedback :I completed task 1 according to Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi's suggestion.

WEEK 6

General Feedback :The teacher introduced the course to us, explained the concept of "painting style" and so on, and asked us to prepare tools and determine the scope of role design.

Specific Feedback :Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi reminded me to bring an electronic drawing board.

WEEK 7

General Feedback :The teacher introduced the skills and methods of illustration communication and reminded us to speed up efficiency

Specific Feedback :None

WEEK 8

General Feedback :Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi gave us time in class to continue completing task 2

Specific Feedback :Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi selected a weapon design and provided suggestions for the actions I drew

WEEK 9

General Feedback :Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi briefly explained the requirements for drawing character scene portraits

Specific Feedback : The teacher made a selection based on the plan I provided him, and I completed the remaining unfinished tasks in Task 2 as required

WEEK 10

General Feedback :Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi reminds students to improve work efficiency

Specific Feedback :The teacher made a selection based on the plan I provided him, and I completed the remaining unfinished tasks in Task 2 as required

WEEK 11

General Feedback : Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi checked the task 2 created by her classmates

Specific Feedback :The teacher reminded me to add some details

WEEK 12

General Feedback : The teacher reminds students to speed up their progress

Specific Feedback :Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi acknowledged the details of my changes and reminded me that drawing backgrounds would be necessary for character gacha portraits

WEEK 13

General Feedback :Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi reminds students to speed up progress and complete the submission of task 3

Specific Feedback :Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi has chosen the draft I drew

WEEK 14

General Feedback : The teacher provided some suggestions for the students' completed tasks and reiterated the submission time for the final task

Specific Feedback :Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi has provided suggestions for modifying the character portraits I have drawn

REFLECTION

Experience

Throughout the process, I felt like I had enriched myself and my abilities had also improved to some extent. But I know it's not enough, I still need to keep working hard, and there's still a long way to go before I reach my ideal. I love painting, but I feel that my abilities are not enough. I usually don't show my paintings to others because it makes me feel very embarrassed. But since I am planning to pursue a career in the painting industry, I must have the courage to be evaluated by others, and communicating more may help clarify my own issues. Thank you very much, Miss Ayunie Juainie Arzmi, for your diligence and patience in guiding and helping me successfully complete all the tasks.

Observation

As our overall tasks revolve around specific games, during the research process, I found that the style of the game itself is very important. If a commercial game has a unique style, it may be easier to notice. Of course, there are differences in human aesthetics, and in such cases, only a small percentage of people may like it. Therefore, in the process of game development, the positioning of art style is very important, because it is necessary to expand the audience as much as possible and form one's own unique style. However, in general, the style of a game will also change over time, trends, and other aspects, such as the setting of character clothing elements, color matching, character portrait forms, copywriting, and so on

Findings

For me, drawing is based on my passion, so I often follow my own preferences and create sketches. There are few highly completed artworks, so the overall task of character design is a challenge for me. Although I am happy to draw these contents, I still often feel very distressed about my painting skills. But after completing it, I deeply realized that painting with goals can improve my painting skills faster, and the same goes for highly completed drawings. And timely feedback is really important, because those who are in the right place are confused and those who are bystanders are clear. Sometimes we cannot understand or face our own problems, and we need someone to remind us. At the same time, it is advisable to draw as much as possible, as only by drawing more can there be the greatest potential for improvement. Of course, efficiency should also be taken into account. Without efficiency, any extra time may be in vain.