Hello! I’m currently working on characters for a personal short film.
As with all personal projects it’s indecision time!
I have made variations on some palettes I like but I would love to crowdsource some opinions on people’s favourite colours.
Of course, colour/material should be story/world inspired but my plan is to create characters and then form the world, dirt, rock and animal skin colours from the characters. For now what do you think is ‘beautiful’.
Also from the clay version, please critique away any decision choices you like/don’t. (Don’t mind the arm clipping for now!)
This is great really !
To me nothing strikes me being overly better in terms of color palettes, they all works to some extent.
Maybe try to work on the environment and you might see some palettes that allows to separate better the characters from the BG for instance.
The only comment I have is that we tend to be attracted by face, and the fact that their are masked is a bit confusing. Put it differently I’d try to bring the focal point to the face of the character, the focus is currently in the center of the chest. But I’ll try to add a strong contrast on the forehead or near the eyes.
I think it’s ok to have the face masked but I’m not sure it’s ok to loose the face as a focal point.
To me it works quite well in this character :
face is masked but we can still see some kind of eyes, and we look at the face right away.
This example is super clever :
The faces are still a focal point because they have very little detail compared to everything else.
The whole body is very uniform too. So it’s possible to bend the rules , but I’m pretty sure that will make the character work better, and might also help the colors, since you can use that to create contrast if needed !
Yes sorry if that wasn’t clear, I’m really talking about the design here !
The same way it’s best to add a focal point to an image , it’s best to add focal points to main elements especially characters.
Ask yourself why we need focal points in the first place ?
And when you look at characters you look for the face, and even more the eyes most of the time.
Ahhh thank you for such a detailed and considered reply!
True, true the focus on the face can be improved - I was initially considering doing this with just value and/or colour but that second picture you posted is a great example that any form of contrast against the larger body/picture works. Really nice example.
