The Christmas Project

Christmas time, what better way to spend it than working? And I’m being serious here; it’s brilliant that I got an Intuos 5, however there’s nothing I wanted more than to carry on working. Because I’m sad. And boring, obviously.

The project we were given – to design an evil Christmas character, couldn't have been better for me. The one thing I love doing is designing characters and drawing creepy ladies. However for some reason I drew a blank with concepts. Originally, I planned on a Krampus-styled character, a character who would abduct/kill naughty children at the oh-so-festive time of year. Silhouettes for this, however, ended up being boring. Or not focusing on the theme at all, other than using the concept. When I decided to attempt to bring more Christmassy aspects into the design – for example, reindeer, I fell onto the idea of genetic modification/splicing. As my mood board included images from the movie Splice – of which is about the very same theme – I felt compelled to further this design.

Although I didn’t further it much, due to a series of brain farts and my usual liking for the first design, adjusting the pose did a lot for the design. My second mood board mainly decided the colour – the wintery, snowy scenes allowing a cool feel – both calm yet when applied to my character, creepy.

From here I considered the backstory further – taking inspiration from the story in the film “Splice”. In the movie, the creation attempts to kill and “take vengeance” on her creator – of whom injected her own genes into the creature. Therefore, it made sense for my creation to kill her creator – Santa Clause.

Whilst designing clothes for the character – now titled “Subject 12” – I considered the backstory; whether she’d escaped and had time to hunt for pelts and bones, stolen Santas clothes after she’d killed him, whether she’d simply broken free and killed him on sight, or whether she’s been used in the sense of a doll by Santa – dressed up and exploited against her will. Although I wanted to avoid this final theme, I couldn’t help but consider how I could further the idea – researching lingerie and corsetry, as well as the sex industry and adjusting her appearance accordingly. In the end I went with the simplicity of bandages – covering enough but implying no chance to get fully clothed.

The poster design was inspired by the movie Alien 4 – mainly the scene where Ripley – of whom is a genetic construction following her death in the previous movie, stumbled upon the lab with her previous, failed forms. The colour pallet could have been experimented with some more – however the initial green I used seemed to fit well, following the contrasting red and green colours commonly associated with Christmas yet not over powering the blue colours on Subject 12. The story board itself is visible in the poster – something I wanted to do initially, however I would have enjoyed to further a focus on the character more. Cropping the final poster did help this, however with the story visible in the back I still feel it took away from the image in total.