Vikki hesse - Character Design

Association Of Illustrators

Inside Illustration Creative Practice Course 3: "Illustration for Children's Animation"

The Brief- (Quoted from Henry St Leger's faux brief)

“A pair of characters with the theme ‘Opposites’.

This will be for the 6+ audience, The “programme” will be animated in 2D and we really want a hand drawn old fashioned feel.

The environment will be a plain background. All the action will come from the interaction between the two characters.

Therefore they must be bold, expressive, dynamic and playful. Although they are often ‘opposites’ they are, at the shows core, the best of friends.”

Lu and Sol character pinups

Lu's character sheet

Lu's palette tests

Early concepts

early concepts

Sol's palette tests

The Project- Ebony and Daniel are the focal characters of "Meteor Shower" (My storyboards for this Project can be found here)

Ebony is reserved and quiet. Her self consciousness and emotional state controls how she acts.

Daniel is a battered carousel horse with a broken ear, he looks a little sad and rundown but in reality is loyal, energetic and wants to be outgoing

Ebony Final Concept & Expressions

Ebony Concept Sketches

Daniel Final Concept & Expressions

Daniel Concept Sketches

Daniel Colour Palette Concepts

Daniel Concept Sketches

The Project- Anne T. is a curious but methodical Ant, designed for a stop Motion project based on the an adventure interpretation of the fable of "The Ant and The Grasshopper".

Anne's stop motion puppet was fabricated by myself, she features a foam body, "Milliput" and "Super Sculpey" clay head with a modelling clay (Plasticine) bottom jaw and eyelids, paper pupils and hand sewn clothing.

Anne T. Stop Mo Character Design Turnaround

The Project- "Hubris" Creature Design. Hubris is a huge, humanoid monster built out of black tar-like goop and items of peoples garbage, with the main character's plastic bottle at his beating heart. Below are my finalised designs for our graduation film.

Hubris' Final Design Turnaround

Hubris' Gesture Sheet

Hubris' Expression Sheet

Hubris' Gesture Sheet

Hubris Early Skull Shape Exploration

The Project- Dragon is a cheeky, chaotic and optimistic shapeshifter character that I've had for a long time, they've almost become like a personal "mascot". Their old design no longer fitted their personality or the purpose of the character so I created a project to change up their design professionally, ensuring that I had a design that allowed Consistency over different forms, could be easier to animate and Incorporated old inspirations of the original concept.