Exam Week 1 - Concept Art

So I've gotten to the end of week 1 of my exams. Right now the end goal is to have a fully rendered and semi-animated scene involving a story moment between two characters by the end of next week. This week was mostly involved with designing the two characters, creating all the various expressions, turnarounds etc. to describe them and figuring out what my story is. It's been a lot of work!

So to begin with I chose to do a sci-fi scene where a daughter finds he long-lost father. After a lot of sketching I decided to go through several phases of design to get the strongest designs possible, starting with armor sets:

By merging elements of the ones I liked I came up with the final designs and moved on to colour, where I experimented with different looks.

After that I selected my two favourites and unified them a little more. Right now I'm thinking the reds and blues are sort of family colours.

And once that was done I had to create a lot of reference sheets, expressions and turnarounds to show all the ins and outs of each character. The expression sheets were definitely a challenge as I am not used to drawing a lot of different emotions. I am still missing range of motion sheets for each character but I might not have time to do them.

And finally here are the finished designs separately:

Going this in-depth with character design has been a very rewarding and intense experience, being completely different from my environment-focused self study. There was a massive amount of work involved in working this way but I think the strength of the resulting characters makes it worth it. I'm really looking forward to put them in a scene together!