Character design

This week we were introduced to Character design in Visual Language. We used different basic shapes to experiment with making a character that would fit into one of the places we had drawn for the "Environmental storytelling" brief. Because I had drawn the Dark Arches I thought of a few different characters, like a frog, a homeless person and a vampire. I liked the idea of a vampire best because I thought the setting would suit it really well. I played with a simple bean shape for the vampires body, changing the posture, height and the placement of the head until I came up with a few designs that I liked. The first one I really liked was the tall vampire with a hunched back and long arms and fingers. This was my idea for a scary vampire that would enjoy scary people and is really old. The next design I really liked was the young small vampire, which I used a simple triangle shape as a body to create, a small circle as a head and then short legs. I thought the idea of a cute little vampire that is quite lonely and just wants to make friends would be interesting. I have never tried character design before and had never really thought I would enjoy it or be good at it, but I was actually surprised that I enjoyed coming up with this character and playing around with shapes so much. I have inserted my initial ideas below;