1970s Character project

I really do enjoy character projects most of all. Fine detail observation as well – my two favourite things, suiting my need for things to be detailed and neat.

I’d like to say I had no idea what I was doing, started from a completely blank slate and could fully develop my work in an interesting way and push my capabilities but.. well, that didn’t happen. I wanted to do something opposite of my original idea, but I liked that idea too much.

My initial idea was to design someone based off of 1970s punk bands that I liked - thinking either Subhumans, Bad Brains or Crass. Eventually I decided on the Xray Spex - my moodboard consisted of Poly Styrene and Tank Girl (even though she emerged in the 1980s, she was a good influence for the personality aspect of my character).

  I found that some of my designs ended up orientating to a more 1990's/modern day crust punk influence - this being mainly due to what I'd consider a lack of research. As I wanted to do a "DIY or die" influenced character, I wanted to put her in somewhat typical,simple fashion clothing - more of a Poly attire, but then convey a more punk/tank girl essence about her. This was more difficult than I originally anticipated, as in some cases she ended up too cute or fashionable looking. It was also said I accidentally drew myself - the bottom right design. Oops.

For the finalisation it was a choice between the middle two designs, as I felt they were most like what I wanted to convey within the theme. I ended up going with the more Poly Styrene styled outfit - adding the jumper and socks from the other design as they just seemed to fit. I somewhat wish that I'd gone with the other design - adding more tears and some patterns onto the skirt, however what's done is done now - in future I think I'll have to consider more possibilities from further developments in order to properly design my final outcome.

Colour selection was a pain. I decided to limit myself to a selection of colours gathered from my mood boards - entirely from the 1970s stylised posters, the majority of which being from Jacknife posters. However because of this, I found myself limited in my colour combinations, as well as the majority of the colours coming out too bright for the theme I wanted to convey - a little too disco for my liking. In the end I decided to take the 2nd design in on the top row and adjust the colours of the jumper, and dirty her up a bit - accidentally going a bit too crust punk/street rat for the original theme I wanted to convey. However, it made the in situ easier for myself as I could think of a definite location to fully complement and express this underlying street rat appearance.