Coraline

One of our visual design projects for this year was to design a book character referring solely to the description of said character in the book, as well as their personality.
I decided to do Neil Gaimans "Coraline" - a sweet, twisted childrens' tale with a curious main character. Coralines description mainly relys on her personality, her appearance is basic - brown hair, with an iconic yellow boots, red scarf and blue coat. Initially, I felt I had chosen the wrong character to design - such a basic, every-day description surely couldn't produce an interesting character?
Then I considered her personality a bit more. How would I represent that in pure aesthetics? To begin with, I looked at imagery of young girls - mainly on dolls, in order to get an exaggerated personality in a purely aesthetic way.

 From here, producing silhouettes to attempt to explore poses, as well as how to give her an iconic look. Wild hair or fluffy hoods seemed to do the trick - but getting across certain aspects of her appearance without making her seem too old was difficult. Ideally I wanted to get across she was young and small for her age, but give her practical enough clothes so that she could be adventurous and explore with ease. In reality at the age Coraline is - of which I envision to be around 10, she would still be being brought clothes by her mother - so no doubt they'd have feminine aspects to them.

 Exploring with how wild I could make her hair was good fun, as well as focusing in on her features. In the end, wild short hair seemed to fit best - not to say that I wasn't tempted to play around with cute hats and hoods.

 Further developments found me experimenting with the aspect of how girly I should make her - playing around with the level of doll-like clothes, dress coats and hoodies. Honestly, I liked the majority of these choices - but some of them were either too over the line of doll like, and others made her look a bit too old for what I was going for. In the end, I decided upon the first one - simple, noticeably feminine yet with the wild hair which made her stand out silhouette wise. Finding a colour for the shorts to match the somewhat large cluster-f of colours that was going on with her design was a bit of a pain. In the end, after playing around with the hue, a purpley burgandy seemed to fit best - paired with yellow highlights and blue shadows it seemed to fit well.

As a side project, I had a go at modelling her face entirely in ZBrush. Childrens faces are difficult to do, I now understand why in so many games you rarely see accurate children.