'Umbrella' Part 1 - Concept Designs

To begin the pre-production of my new project 'Umbrella' I wanted to design some characters just to give me an idea on where I wanted to take it. Here are a few concept designs I went through and I'll talk about each image along the way:

This was the first sheet I did for my character concepts. As you can see they are completely different from one another and don't show much relation at all. I purposefully did this to let my brain be as creative as possible when designing these as the more options I have the more I can pick and choose characters. It also gave me the chance to try and think of a story on the go as I looked into each personality of the character and where they might take part in certain events.

Here I started to focus on two more designs which were referenced by the two top left designs in the previous sheet, I quite liked the idea of playing with insects as I found them to be quite easy to draw and it was fun to express their emotions on them. The only thing that pulled me back from using these in my animation was the grasshoppers cape as it did seem quite excessive to be animating all the time. Not only that but I just couldn't imagine a good enough story which featured these two characters so ultimately I decided to scrap these characters and try and draw more in the meantime.

Here I developed two more characters and I was instantly interested once I finished. My main inspiration was seeing a lot of bee-related drawings on Twitter and attempting to draw them out myself. I did think however the bee in this image looked a little too much like a rabbit with it's antennas hence why I decided to change his design a little bit in the final outcome. The ghost however looks pretty much the same, the only change being that I decided to change his gloves into blobs just to make it easier for animating.

Lastly here was a piece of art I received from a friend who really enjoyed the characters and wanted to help create her own scenes with them, showing how some of the actions and poses would look in an illustrative form. I think doing collaborations like this can be really important when working with people who are interested in your project as not only does it give you a second eye when looking into your work but it also sets you up for industry standard for when you might need to collaborate in the future.