One Week Character Challenge

This week I took a break from my usual practice schedule to participate in Paintables’s One Week Character class. The students were provided with briefs to choose from and then focus on trying to work with that brief while following David Belliveau’s workflow. He did live videos from Monday to Friday covering each stage of the process and answering questions.

It’s a good workflow overall, but I struggled to tune in to the sessions so did everything a day or two behind. There was a whole Discord community for it but I found it was too busy and messy, the way I often find Discord servers to be. But it was a good experience and it helped me stay focused on one piece for a whole week and be pretty happy with the end product.

Day 1 - Figure drawing and finding a pose

I wasn’t hype on any of the five briefs that were provided, even by the time day one rolled around. I found them all to be extremely basic and straightforward character wise. This made it pretty difficult to get started, so I spent a good 20 minutes scrolling Pinterest while watching the first video.

The first thing I decided on was ‘scythe’. They’d been on my mind since the launch of Arlecchino in Genshim Impact…

This led to looking for poses of people holding poles that could have a blade added to the end of them. Ended up with this reference and this base figure. By this point Fallen Angel felt like the most logical choice from the briefs.

Day 2 - Clothing

Day 2 focused on dressing the figure from day 1. I was pretty familiar with this step from last years courses and used parts of those approaches for this. Search for references and ideas then work with blocking in shapes to focus on balance on composition. I created 3 different ones during the course of the video for the day.

Day 3 - Colours

The video for day 3 started with linework so I felt behind instantly as I’m still kind of stuck in having linework for a lot of my work. This day ended up taking a fair bit of time as I did a cleanup pass on the clothing, then a true linework layer after that. And then got around to trying out colours.

Day 4 - Details

Another thing that made the challenge more… challenging, was that colouring details other than clothing weren’t covered until day 4. The main outfit detail I had was all the metal and honestly, I don’t have too much experience with metal. I’ve done a lot with flat greys but haven’t done a lot of shading techniques. David’s little tutorials were very helpful for how to approach these details. Choosing a reference and really focusing on it to learn a style to then apply to the parts of the character that require that. An exercise I’ll try to fit into one of my practice weeks.

A lot of this day was spent trying to develop how I wanted the metal to look. I don’t love it but I started with the boots and I am pretty happy with the boots. I feel like they have the right amount of details.

Day 5 - Finishing details

The stuff focused on day 5 was a lot of the stuff that I often skip over. Usually after I accomplish the stuff from day 4 I’m feeling fairly over a piece. The big emphasis of the lessons over the week was to skip to a workflow. It helps to know which part to work on next and in which order. I found this very helpful in sticking with the piece for this long, even feeling like I was doing something different every day since each focus is a rather different creative challenge.

This day was re-doing the breastplate which I wasn’t happy with, finishing up any textures I wanted to add and doubling down on the shadows and highlights.

Conclusion

I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through this week. I didn’t like the community aspect, I wasn’t sure if I was going to learn anything different from the previous courses I had done, and I went to the movies when there was a chance the videos would be taken down and I wouldn’t have a chance to watch the last one. But they ended up being still available Sunday morning and I was able to get my last details in then.

It feels good to finish a digital piece, and to not skip on the details. A lot does really come together in those last few stages. Given that this feels like a success I’m thinking of changing up my practice schedule once again. Along with adding a week every month to focus on anatomy, I might also devote a week to completing a single piece to put my practice into place.