Character Concept Progress: Antagonist

After designing my protagonist and the "damsel in distress", I had to create an antagonist - I went into this design a lot more blind than with the previous concept. 

Since I was feeling stumped with this concept, I began by franken-concepting silhouettes like I did with Russi initially. (This was where I looked at pre-existing characters, got rid of all colour to create a silhouette shape, then merged elements of each design that I like). I did create a few designs from this but I wasn't inspired by them so I didn't work into them any further. 

Above: The silhouettes of pre-existing characters

Below: The silhouettes I put together which I decided to abandon (for now, at least)

Following this, I was pretty disheartened about creating this character and focused on preparing for my Design Research 2 essay for a while. I think this is because of my background/interest in narration, so I was obsessing on details like motives which was bogging me down in terms of design. But despite that, I woke up one morning with some ideas that I quickly jotted onto some sticky notes. 

The sticky notes were actually a great turning point for me, even though it seems like something really small. I just doodled whatever came into my head over a couple of note sheets. It really helped me to nail the vibe I was going for with the character and to get out of my own head with the plot-related stuff. I decided that I wanted a character with two key sides. First would be the 'friendly' form where they're acting as if they want to help Russi on her adventure, but their design is kind of shady so you might suspect something about them; then the second element of their design would be some kind of formless, ominous being that seems to overpower Russi at first. It dawned on me that it doesn't matter if my plot seems "generic" because there is actually a comfort that comes from something that is in some ways familiar, especially for a younger audience. There is a good reason why the "damsel in distress" and "generic big evil thing" (there is probably a name for what I'm getting at here) thing is done so much. 

After the sticky notes I really wanted to hone in on this two-sided personality and character design. I started this by creating a table of some key words that I want each 'side' of the character to be associated with.

From this table I started to focus on the 'friendly' form some more. I took some of the key words and created a spider diagram, the purpose of this was to try to think outside the box in a different way to when I was franken-concepting, to ensure I created some different concepts. 

I took the phrases "concealed face" and "magic user", I came up with a lot of related words and some vague design ideas based on this. Next I sketched some designs, which I've shown below, with a rough scale of how the friendly form would size up against Russi herself. (The villainous form will be MUCH bigger!) 

This is kind of where I've stopped for now, since I have the essay for Design Research 2 to work on. But I'm satisfied with my progress and I hope I'll be able to flesh out my antagonist character before my final hand-in for this semester.