Character Development

As a continuation from my drawings of characters from Robot Jones, I had a play about with making my own characters inspired by the pre-existing ones from the show, with the idea in mind for a nerdy romance comic.

(Unnamed, Not-Very-Original Midget-Glasses-Girl based off of Cubey)

(Unnamed Tall-Fringey-Boy, and an embarrassed older Glasses-Girl and Fringey-Boy having a cuddle)

Then I became distracted with the cartoon show 'Ed Edd n Eddy'.

(Official image from 'Ed Edd n Eddy' of the three main characters)

I forgot all about 'Whatever Happened to Robot Jones?' and started drawing Ed Edd n Eddy characters instead.

(My first drawing of character Edd (also known as Double D), plus with Ed's head poking out from behind him. Drawn with a reference)

(Pen sketch of Double D, drawn without a reference, during my RE lesson when I probably should have been working)

(Pen sketch of Ed, drawn without reference)

 (Pencil sketches of Ed, Edd and Eddy.  Ed and Edd drawn without references, Eddy drawn with a reference)

I also drew myself and some friends in the 'Ed Edd n Eddy' style to practice with the style.

 (It's me!)

 

(My best friend, Ellie)

(My friend Ben, drawn in a free period during college. Also Woody Woodpecker.)

 (More practice of the style in the form of a thank-you-note to my godmother; coloured with Copic Markers)

Then I began more serious character- and style-development as far as my unit 3 course was concerned. I began to consider doing a semi-autobiographical comic in a style inspired by the 'Ed Edd n Eddy' style. First I drew a first simple design of what the main character would look like.

(Nothing special. Just me basically.)

Then I remembered the Cubey-from-'Robot Jones'-inspired glasses-girl and decided I wanted a character who wore glasses. I came up with this guy:

I was pleased with him and so I decided to draw him some more.  Here are some of him pulling different facial expressions and such:

Then I decided to draw him in the poses I drew from this post:

BONUS DRAWING!:

(Poor guy. He fell over!)

Just need to think of a name for him now.

Evaluation

The style in which I drew my final piece, and in particular the character of Jeff, has been developed and refined over a period of time.  I knew from the beginning that I wanted a more cartoony and simplistic style to the one I normally draw in, as evidenced by the doodly ink drawings found in this blog post of mine, as well as studying and emulating artists with a style similar to the one I was looking for.  These included James Kochalka's "American Elf", "Whatever Happened to Robot Jones?" and of course, "Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy" (as shown in this post), the style of which was most influential to my final piece's characters' final design (although I was influenced by all artists studied).  By drawing the characters from these series and making my own characters in an emulation of their style, it significantly helped create a library of aspects I liked about each respective artist's work in my mind and then apply these aspects to the character designs that i used for my final piece.  In retrospect, I feel that because it was a new style for me, the drawings in the style were a little clumsy at times, particularly in the anatomy of the characters as I was unsure of which of their features I should exaggerate for the cartoony look I wanted and so sometimes made mistakes.  However I did learn a lot from developing a drawing style like this, and I feel it has helped improve my current style of drawing to this day.