Manav Sachdev, a renowned character and concept artist based in Delhi conducted a Character Design workshop at the 4thAnime Convention. He revealed the different fundamentals of Character Designs to the 30 attendees of this session.
Manav has been working in the creative industry since the past six years across a wide range of disciplines from illustration to game concept art, package design. He is currently a senior visualizer at 9.9 Mediaworx Pvt Ltd and illustrates for magazines like ‘Digit’, ‘CIO leader’, ‘IT Next’ and many more. In his long creative career, creating monsters, dark creatures and superheroes have been his favorites part, though he likes to call himself a versatile artist.
Talking to AnimationXpress.com, Manav shared how he focused on how geometric shapes can be used to create characters with a special focus on superheros. He also shared with the audience some of the characters designed by him and the fundamentals behind creating them.
Observe, Research, Visualize and Execute were the key points of character design that he shared with the audience. According to him, it is important to be observant of the world around, as it helps an individual to visualize and create his own characters. One has to carry out his own research and then either follow a given script or make a script that makes visualization and execution easy. He adds ‘Realism plays an important role in my characters but it not about copying a character but observing it and then executing it in my way’
Manav further shares, “Expressions play the most important role. It is the expressions that define the body language of a character and also his surroundings.” The character artist has to be able to decide on the mood of a character like happy, sad, angry and then work on elements like surroundings and colours to depict the same.
In order to understand the mood of a character, one needs to find out various reasons as why his or her character is sad or happy. He even trained the attendees of this workshop on this by giving them different mood examples from real life experiences. He told them to find out reasons as to why they themselves experience a particular mood and draw sketches accordingly..
Colours play a major role in enhancing the look of a character; Manav prefers to use specific set of colors to show several moods . “For dark characters, it’s better to use dull colours like purple, black and brighter shades of yellows and reds to add a happy touch to the environment or character” he adds.
This comprehensive workshop helped the audience to think deeply what goes into creating characters. Manav made the audience draw rough character sketches keeping in mind certain guidelines and encouraging them to use their own creative imagination.
“4TH Anime Convention was a great experience for me, I was able to guide young minds in expanding their creative imagination and make them aware that being a concept artist and character artist can also be a very successful career option“ Manav Sachdev concludes.