Jon Boam character design workshop

We were very lucky to have the incredibly talented (and softly-spoken) Jon Boam come in to the college to help Matt and Kris lead a masterclass on character development. I found it an enjoyable experience, but not without it's difficulties. Character design is not one of my strengths, and my own work is almost never character led.

One thing I noticed was that I found myself relying quite heavily on text and very explicit cues to contextualize a lot of my characters - this was a real weakness of a lot of the work I produced that day. I realize that I should be striving to create characters that are bold and stand alone, so that they do no require this. My lack of certainty/confidence in my ability to create characters was only emphasized by the fact that I fell back on writing.

Surprisingly (and a pleasant surprise, at that!), the part of the workshop that I enjoyed the most was working with pre-drawn solid shape, and having to build a character around that. I didn't expect to enjoy this process at all, purely because I don't like working with pure shape, but actually found it quite easy to  generate ideas about how to work character design into these solid masses. I was really glad about this, because it brought home to me the fact that (although I still have many MANY ups and downs) I am, at least starting, to think 'like an illustrator', in that I was managing to solve a problem.

What to take away from this experience:

• Something exciting and engaging can grow out of the simplest thing, or shape.
• Remember that it's okay to be silly sometimes. Silliness can be inspiring.
• The most successful character designs are the purest ones, the ones that can speak for themselves, and do not need lines of explanation.