BPA 2D Contest part 1-
Character Design
This was a group project retelling a fairy tale into something new. We chose a fairy tale from the Grimm Brothers called ‘Frau Trude’, or ‘Mother Trudy’. It’s a story about a misbehaving girl that gets turned into a block of wood by a witch. This portfolio shows the process I took to make the character designs, as well as translating others designs into the official style of the animation.
I was the one who made Frau Trude’s design. I went with three different outfits for three different themes. Design A was meant to be a opulent looking person with money, B was meant to look kind and motherly, and C was meant to look like a classic witch: an old woman. We decided that a mix of A and B was the best design.
Once I chose a design, I used a color generator website to work out some color pallets for her outfit. Our team settled on C, with some mild alterations to the eye color. I also used the opportunity to decide which design for the devil form looked better. (B was)
Bee was the one who designed the girl. With the prompt of a style similar to WolfWalkers in mind, they designed the girl with red hair and a messy dress. When I translated the design into the art style that the final animation would be in, I simplified the design a bit and added more shapes to the hair to make it seem more cartoonlike.
Sadira was the one who made the Parents design. She made them look stern, and gave them simple designs that were easy to translate over to the final art style. One change that we did just for the animation was to make the mothers hair blonde, so only the Girl and Frau Trude had red hair.
Mentioned in the original story was a butcher, charcoal burner, and a hunter specifically dressed in red, black, green respectively. Unfortunately, the final story didn’t have room for these characters, so they remained unused.
Here is a sketch I made to design the setting of the story. I wanted to make the Girl’s house feel cozy, but also a bit ramshackle and run down. By contrast, Frau Trude’s house was meant to look nicer and also cozy, but stiff and cold with its straight lines and perfect geometry.
