Art Event 5

3/15 - Character Design Workshop : Stephen Shaskan

This was my personal favorite out of all the events I attended, although I arrived late because I had take notes during a lecture for another class at the same time I still learned alot from this workshop and even stayed afterwards to talk about my Senior Thesis and design questions with Professor Barlow and Mr. Shaskan. There was a methodology to not only how he designed characters but how he positioned them - tips and tricks on how to do it. For example, Shaskan used simple shapes to dictate the forms in which his characters take and he gave me a very helpful rule in which a silhouette helps distinguish your character. Like if I designed a character and made it completely black and stood it next to another character and somebody else could completely tell them apart then I’ve successfully followed the silhouette rule. We learned that who your character is impacts what they look like - I received a really helpful list of questions to help break down characters. Because if you know how they walk, talk, what makes them happy, what colors they enjoy, who they are as people - then it’s so much easier to determine what they look like and how their appearance is supposed to influence your perception of them in order to maintain accuracy. We also discussed useful tips and tricks in photoshop that help to give art a bit more personality, we played around with different brushes, overlays that helped give texture to the art and creative decisions that helped infer a tone or meaning behind your work. A highlight of this workshop was the emotions segment in which we played around with the concept of making our characters super expressive since cartoons often over-accentuate emotions in order to emphasize a character’s thought or emotion. Overall, this was a very engaging and informative workshop that really helped me further my design process for my personal project.