Character Design Evaluation/SWOT Analysis

During this module, I designed a character for which I would later use in an animated short. The character I created was based on the small illustration I made in the first week back to college; the slime skull. During the module, I gave the character a body, a basic back story, completed various turn around's, and created an expression guide. I named the character 'Goop', as I felt like it fit the character, being made of slime, but I felt like words like 'slime', 'sludge' etc. were too generic, but 'goop' is a less common word.

During the module, I feel my main strength was the way in which I experimented with and learned Adobe Illustrator, with the assistance of my tutor. During the module, I used features such as 'Pathfinder' and the 'Blend' feature to create the look of my character, with the descending 'slime' effect being made by 'cutting out' the shape of the skull from another shape, and then adding a blended shape behind it.

My main weakness during this module was that, on reflection, I really didn't do enough development work for my character; I generally just made the first thing that popped into my head and added it to the design. I also feel that I didn't put enough effort into the alternate poses for my character sheets, as I would have preferably liked to have more, and more varied poses. At least from this I can see these faults, so that I can work on not repeating them in the future.

The main opportunity this module opened up to me was to be more experimental in Adobe Illustrator, as before hand I pretty much just used the limited knowledge I had to create my illustrations, but now I am far more experimental, trying to make use of the many features available to create illustrations with far more interesting visual appeal.

In the future I aim to utilize the features I have learned about to create more interesting artwork and assets. I aim to play around with the software more, and try to learn more and more about the tools and features as I go along, as I feel this will help the quality of my illustrations, and allow me to create more visually appealing work.