For my first illustration project, I'm super excited to be illustrating a famous person from history. The idea is to reinvent the person to convey physical and emotional characteristics while exploring exaggeration, archetype, and silhouette. The character's design must be depicted in both an active and passive pose.
As a fan of the history and all things bizarre, I felt compelled to illustrate one of the most peculiarly disturbing people in history: Grigori Rasputin, the Russian monk who exhibited deviant and narcissistic behaviors during the reign of the Romanov royal family. Because of his deceitful and manipulative behavior, one could describe Rasputin as a rat.
And thus, "Rat"sputin was born.
With the idea to have Rasputin's physical state take on his mental state, I decided to turn Rasputin into a rat. One of my favorite animated films of all time is "The Secret of NIMH", so I took inspiration from the elder rat Nicodemus while considering the characteristics of Ratsputin.
One hallmark of a successful character design is the ability to recognize a character's silhouette. The concept behind this is that the traits of a character become so iconic that they could not possibly belong to any other character, thus giving your character unmistakable recognizably for marketing purposes, etc., thus making his form dynamic. Mickey Mouse is a great example: his ears are unmistakable. Video game character concept designers start with a basic silhouette of a character and build up the details of the character as the design progresses. This is to ensure that in a virtual world of filled with monsters, creatures, and villains, no two characters are similarly design and so that gamers know instinctually what the character is and which tactic to use (at the bottom of the post is an image of famous siloed characters so you can see the power of form and how recognizable it can be). Silos help artists avoid depicting characters symmetrically head-on, which become static and boring.
To ensure a dynamic form, I started with simple gesture sketches and research of who Rasputin was as a person. I chose one active and one passive sketch to develop further into character silos. Below is the outcome of my silo development plus the quick sketches.
To see the power of form, check out this graphic of famous characters and see how many you can identify.
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| Courtesy of www.globalnerdy.com |