Reflective Drawing and Writing
Reflective
Writing
The 10 steps
of my project.
1. Selecting
the theme of “Society” and the sub-theme of “mental illness”
2. Researching
into the most diagnosed mental illness in adolescents and young adults.
3. Researched
in modern characters that have been designed to have mental disorders.
4. Researched
into how these characters were designed and why they are so effective.
5. Took this
information into account a drew up some initial designs for my own characters.
6.
Researched colour and shape theory.
7. Asked fellow classmates to fill out a questionnaire
about mental illness and took this information in to account for my designs.
8. Drew up
initial designs for character using shape theory and carrying the motifs through-out
the character design process.
9.
Experimented with different colour schemes and tones to find an effective design.
10. Complete
the design aspect of the project, then created a full character turn around and
emotion board.
From the
beginning of this project I knew that I wanted to create something to do with
mental health, as it something very personal to myself and that I could put my
heart into my creation.
As an
aspiring character designer, I had a clear idea I wanted to create characters
as my final piece, I did however other ideas to make storyboards for a short animation,
but character design was my true passion, so I decided to keep to this idea.
I was going
to be combining mental illness with character design, it only seemed logical to
create characters that were suffering with mental illnesses.
I decided to
go and look at the facts and did research into the most diagnosed mental illness
in the UK and USA between the ages of 16 and 25 for both genders, as this was
the demographic, I wanted to design my characters towards.
As I was
doing research into this, I decided to investigate already existing characters
that have been designed with mental illness in mind. It was actually quite hard
to pin-point these characters. Big ones that popped up were the Cast from “Winnie the Pooh”, Belle from “Beauty and the
Beast”, Ariel from “The Little Mermaid” and many more main stage characters.
After
concluding that Elsa from “Frozen” was a strong candidate for depression with
evidence from the directors themselves, I decided to look to the smaller screen
to look for more evidence. I found that many characters from the show Steven
Universe had been designed with mental illness, which had actually been addressed
in the show itself, and also found that “Sesame Street” had introduced a new muppet
with autism two years prior to my
research.
A big part
of these characters were there colour schemes and the shapes they were based
around, I looked deeper into colour and shape theory and found multiple papers
and web sources on the subject, which help me gain a better understanding on
how the human mind associates colours and shapes to emotions.
I wanted to
incorporate my own experiences with mental health into this project, but I also
wanted other’s opinions on the subject too. So, I wrote out a simple three
question answer sheet asking about their own experiences with mental health and
passed it around to my classmates.
This helped me narrow down my choice of mental
illnesses I wanted to focus my characters on; anxiety and depression,
as they were the main two that kept popping up in the questionnaire and this
also lined up with the research I did into the most diagnosed mental disorders.
It also made up my mind that I was going to create two female characters as it
was mostly girls that answered that they suffer with these mental disorders.
So, I drew
up so initial designs for my characters; decided to stick to lose and flowy
shapes for my character with depression
and sharp and angular shapes for the one with anxiety.
After
experimenting with different colour schemes, keeping them quite muted as that’s
what most of the questionnaires had stated, I came to a final character designs
and went forward with turnarounds and emotion boards.
In the end I
have ended up with two characters that had been designed with specific shapes in
mind and used well thought out colour schemes to relay the visual message
across to my audience.
