Theme and Backstory (+ LinkedIn Learning )

For this beginning week I have been considering heavily on which theme I should choose. All four themes have inspired me greatly and have given me some ideas in my head the day they were announced; however, with some tough decision making I decided to choose “Emotional Demon”. The reason to why I chose this theme compared to the others was the juxtaposition of the theme title itself, the idea of a demon seeming emotional is very uncanny and leaves a lot of mystery around it, enough for a story to be created on them.

To help inspire myself on this theme I created a moodboard on Pinterest of different types of characters relating to demons just to observe different features these characters have. Features that came into my mind whilst looking at these images included horns, an arrow-shaped tail, demon wings and so much more. What I noticed whilst creating my moodboard was all the different body shapes of how these characters were created and how different they looked from standard human proportions. This was a mental note I needed to keep in mind whilst designing my character if I wanted them to appear more distinct.

I also wrote a short backstory for my character in mind just to help iconise them better:

This story begins in the flaming depths of the underworld and our character will be starting their first year in college. Considering that they are known as the descendant of The King they have a lot of pressure and attention from all of the other students. Our character dislikes being in the limelight and just wants to fit in with everyone else, however it seems most people in their class aren’t the nicest and would much prefer to tease and bully them instead, which is where our characters emotions of sadness and anger come in to overwhelm them.

Our character’s biggest motivation is to become a success in their father’s eyes; to prove that they are worthy to become the next in line for the throne. However, this character will have to fight against their older, popular and much meaner sibling who cares about nothing but themselves and will become a tyrant to the people in this underworld. Although our character tries to act tough and cool with the people around them, their greatest flaw is that they secretly do enjoy cute things. However, with the pressure from their father and the people around them they must absolutely not share anything about it otherwise their reputation is ruined and their chances of becoming a successor has gone.

To finish on this week’s journal, I wanted to share my thoughts on the LinkedIn learning tutorials as they have inspired me greatly to take a different approach to illustration and concept art: Mary Jane Begin was very inspirational by talking about different shapes and silhouettes of characters in iconic films such as Hotel Transylvania and Kung Fu Panda and how artists will use different tools and techniques to illustrate them on paper. Patrick Ballesteros was also very inspirational with his Concept Art lesson as he definitely helped me open my eyes to the world and taught me that life itself is a lesson for giving us ideas.

https://pin.it/3OQujX1