Study Task 8: Reflective Writing

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.