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.

Study Task 6: Planning a Pratical

I continue to gather information from articles, papers and websites about my subject of mental illnesses.

I have also created a questionnaire which I will pass around to my fellow classmates to ask about their opinions on mental illness, have they or are they currently suffering from it and how they would describe it:

I will be putting the answered questionnaires in my visual journal and using the information that I gather from them to influence my practical work.

I have drawn some rough thumbnails and initial ideas for my characters however these might change after the results of the questionnaire.

Study Task 5: Practical Approaches

What do you intend to investigate and why?

I want to investigate modern cartoon characters with mental illness, how they are created, are they represented well in the media and why they are a necessity.

I want to investigate this because I believe it will help me create better thought-out character designs and to convey a particular feeling with just a visual message. 

There is also a personal aspect to this project, as someone who suffers from mental illness, I want to create characters that help children and young adults understand, identify and seek help with mental illness by making characters based on facts and real situations to help the audience relate to them. 

How can the research help as a starting point?

Having a good understanding of basic character design will help me make compelling characters. Also learning about shape and colour theory will help me establish the right message I want to get across to my audience. Comparing and analysing existing characters with particular designs will help in my investigation and understanding as well.

What do you envisage the end product being?

I want to create at least to well-rounded characters that have meticulously thought out to convey the visual message that they are suffering from a mental illness.

If I have time I would also like to create a looping gif for each of my characters. 

Study Task 4: Introduction

My introduction to my project:

After looking into how mental illness generally affects people, colour and shape theory, I believe I have gathered enough information to make well-rounded and thought out character design that correctly represents their respective illness. Making sure to take information from my fellow classmates and ask them about their own experiences and opinions on mental health I hope to gain a broader understanding and create characters that justifiably represent the mentally ill.



Formal introduction:

Is Mental Illness Portrayed Well in Cartoons?

I have gathered information into how mental illness affects the general populous and how it is portrayed in modern media, as well as looking into how characters are designed with purpose and intent using particular colours and shape theory. I believe this information will help me establish a good groundwork to design and create characters that suffer with mental illness. 

I am using the following texts to help elaborate on my question:


The Psychopathology of Cinema: How Mental Illness and Psychotherapy are Portrayed in Film by Lauren Beachum

"Stereotypes of people with mental illness as dangerous and incompetent reduce these individuals to nothing but the most exaggerated, caricaturized versions of their diagnoses. These caricatures are the products of how mental illness is represented by arguably the most influential institution of our culture: the media."  pg 4


PSYCHOLOGY IN CHARACTER DESIGN Creation of a Character Design Tool by Marika Nieminen

"Colours are very important in projecting a character’s personality; primarily based on the cultural symbolisms associated with them and secondly on aesthetic reasons. By changing the saturation, shade or tint of a hue, the perception of a colour can have drastic changes"

Color Psychology: The Emotional Effects of Colors - arttherapyblog.com

"The psychology of color is based on the mental and emotional effects colors have on sighted people in all facets of life. There are some very subjective pieces to color psychology as well as some more accepted and proven elements. Keep in mind, that there will also be variations in interpretation, meaning, and perception between different cultures."

I have also gathered substantial evidence that many cartoon characters are designed with mental illness in mind;

Blue Diamond from Steven Universe, using shapes such as circles and triangles to convey that she is an unstable character but that she has a softer side to her (ref Nieminen pg 10-11). Using cooler tones she gives off a regal appearance however blue also is represented as a colour of sadness (ref artterapyblog.com), especially in her design which is emphasised by the shapes used in her design.  

Elsa is a prime example of an evolving character, she starts at the start if the film as an anxious, unsure and untrusting individual, shrouded in dark and oppressive tones. However, throughout the course of the film, she learns to accept her insecurities, to not let them control her and that she is allowed to ask for help if needed.

Study Task 3: Images and Theory

I want to explore how modern day characters with mental illnesses are represented in the media and are they being represented well. I will also be looking into how characters are designed and what makes their designs so effective. I want to explore the colour schemes that they choose for certain characters and what emotions those colours evoke in the audience.

In the picture above I had collected data on popular modern day characters and shows that represent mental illness. 

I have used several different sources to help me establish some groundwork for making my own characters. I have used a research paper by Marika Nieminen called Psychology in Character Design to have an understanding of how characters are created for certain roles by using particular colours and shapes.

The Psychopathology of Cinema: How Mental Illness and Psychotherapy are Portrayed in Film - by Lauren Beachum is an informative paper on how the view of mental illness in cinema has changed and why it was seen as such a taboo to have it in plain sight for the audience to see or for them to take it seriously.

Finally "The Book on Human Emotions" by Tiffany W. Smith is a well documented 'dictionary' on a large portion of human emotions, where the meanings of them come from and how they develop over time.

Study Task - Reading and Understanding Texts - Part 2

Summary - What is Madness?

This chapter elaborates on how the human mind deals with traumatic events that we have experienced in our earlier lives, how we have possibly processed them and how this can come out in different ways, such as anxiety and phobias. Darian Leader suggests that we use repression and selective amnesia to process trauma, however, this does mean it can manifest in different forms.   

This is very important to how people with anxiety, especially social anxiety disorder, react to certain situations. Anxiety generally does not appear from thin air, it stems from either one or several traumatic events then the brain tries to analyse this event the best it can, although most of the time the mind contorts the associated memories and creates a defence system formed from fear so that the mind knows to run away from a similarly threatening situation.

As someone who suffers from severe anxiety, it is important to know how it forms and how it affects the human mind in different ways. I will be exploring characters that exhibit the traits and symptoms, as well as creating my own characters suffering from the same mental illnesses. 

Study Task 2 - Reading and Understanding Texts

"What is Madness?" by Darian Leader

What concepts is the author trying to communicate?

Leader is trying to explain the meaning of madness, more in the sense of psychosis; how it affects the mind in different ways and what happens when suffering with it.

What are the KEY QUOTES and/or KEY POINTS?

"[...]we need to introduce some basic psychoanalytic ideas. [...]. The simplest place to start is with the notion of defence. [...] If we have experienced a traumatic situation or had an unpalatable thought, we tend to do something about it. We can't just keep it in consciousness, where it would continue to affect us, so we transform it.[...] We apply an amnesia to what to what is too unbearable for us to remember. [...]"

"[...] To find them, however, there are clues: in place of the forgotten memory, a symptom appears, like a ghost that keeps on coming back. This could be a phobia, a tic, a headache, an obsessive thought, a paralysis or any other form of mental or physical intrusion into our lives. [...]"

page 36

He talks about how psychosis possibly could form over time from childhood trauma and that it can manifest into strong phobias and fears.

What EXAMPLES are used by the author?

"In one of Freud's examples, his patient Emma developed a phobia of going into shops alone. She linked this with a memory from when she was twelve: she had gone into a shop and seen two shop assistants laughing together. She had rushed out in a fright, with the idea that the men had been laughing at her clothes and that one of them had attracted her sexually. A second memory soon inflected the first. Aged eight, she had twice gone into a sweetshop and the shopkeeper [...] Although it had happened on her first visit, she had still returned to the shop the second time. Linking the two scenes together, she realized that the shop assistant's laughter in the most recent memory had evoked for her the shopkeeper's grin in the earlier memory." 

page 37

Can you find real world EXAMPLES that you feel follow this model of thought?

See the answer above.

How can this be related to animation or your theme? 

This chapter talks about how psychosis is shaped through trauma and repressed memory, which can be formed by high functioning anxiety. This is something that I definitely relate to and want to explore and elaborate on in my practical work. 

Context of Practice - Year 2 - Study Task 1

Initial Ideas

I wanted to research and write something that I find interesting and effects me personally; mental illness and how it is represented in cartoons.

I chose the theme 'Society' as I think mental illness has a great effect on people socially (i.e anxiety, depression, etc) and I want to look into how mental disorders are represented in the media towards young minds.

Gathering Contemporary Fashion

I gathered a few images of mannequins from different stores in the center of Leeds and as I did I began to see the different demographics that the stores were trying to appeal to.

The first couple of stores where definitely trying to appeal to an older woman or a mature younger woman. The clothes were very feminine, using pastel tones and flowy materials to give lovely silhouettes that would be perfect for a mature woman looking for a light, springtime look. However, there were certain garments that I would enjoy wearing myself like the denim jumpsuit and the jeans and cold shoulder shirt.

This style reminds me of something that my fifteen-year-old sister would like to wear, millennial pink and black are quite a popular trend at the moment, it gives that edgy, young, sporty vibe that I have seen a lot of young teenage girls wear.

 I believe that these clothes take inspiration from the 60's and 70's (which is fashion that I am greatly a fan off), the floral patterns and bright colours give me a 'Summer of Love' vibe. 

These mannequins are appealing towards the women of the city who are looking to revamp their tired office look with a pop cheerful yellow.

I just liked that these mannequins were 'plus size', they give a look to the clothes that a much slimmer frame couldn't. They look very mature and curvy.

 These looks were taken at Primark, I didn't really think that Primark had a demographic until I really started to look at the way they had dressed these mannequins, they are targetting ages between young teens and possibly early 20 years old. These mannequins definitely had attitude and not just from the clothes they were wearing but also the way that they had been possed, the way a jacket is hanging from some of their forearms, the bright and poppy colours and backwards baseball caps this is all appealing to a young and active audience.

Preparatory Task Part 2: Animators

Historical Animator: Ivor Wood

Ivor Wood- Wikipedia Page
The Wombles - Directed and Animated by Ivor Wood
The Magic Roundabout
Paddington Bear
A Blog on Ivor Wood

Contemporary: Seth Macfarlane



Seth Macfarlane - Wikipedia page
Making "Family Guy" and "American Dad"
Seth Macfarlane's First Sketch
The Animated Life of Seth Macfarlane
Seth Macfarlan Biography


International: LeSean Thomas


LeSean Thomas Wiki Page
LeSean Thomas Tumblr Page
The Boondocks "How to Catch a Predator"
Legend of Korra - Fight scene
New Upcoming Series - Children of Ether

Preparatory Task Part 1:The D in David

The D in David

The D in David Short Film by Michelle Yi and Yaron Farkash from Ringling college of art and design. When the Statue of David is humiliated by the other artworks for being naked, David leaves his podium to escape the museum.

I chose this film because I like the style, it's obviously created with 3D animation but it's style is reminiscent of traditional hand drawn animation, which it also uses for the paintings on the wall.

The subject of the short film is funny, I haven't never thought of artwork or mannequins in that way and the fact that they have given David a very vulnerable and shy personality is very endearing so it's quite interesting that's how the animators interpreted him.