Stylizing the 'Vibe' Part 2 - Outfit Design (Bears File + Process Video)

Hey everyone!

What you will find in today's video process is how I started to design using shapes instead of drawing. Often, I got caught up by shape information of the outfit that I usually define with line art, drawing. Because I was not sure what the outfit direction would be precisely, I decided to go with a quick composition technique I used to do back when I worked at Riot Games. 

Back then, I needed to offer daily character design explorations, and I found out it was easier for me to explore shapes and then clean design with lines, instead of starting with lines.

Very similar to the exercise I mentioned a few weeks ago for the pattern recognition post, I created three body shapes using the "Limberto" brush, distinctive enough from each other but still sharing anatomical structures. This quick way to build silhouettes also helped me explore interactive situations in which each character can be connected. It's fair to say that the brush won't do the job for you, but after enough loose strokes, the picture gets half completed in my head, and then I proceed to clean up. I'm not sure how easy this can be for you, but I certainly recommend you to try the "Rorschach Exercise" shared in the pattern recognition post to slowly develop this skill and try this technique technique.

After I briefly set the composition with shapes, I did research on casual outfits. The goal in part was to find a color palette and value distribution similar to the bears in each reference. It's not strictly necessary for the outfit reference to share the exact same color or values since in theory I'm able to alter the values and colors, but it is a bit quicker to visualize the final result.

Sometimes I prefer to choose outfits that are already well balanced and proceed to make small changes, like for the black bear character. As for the grizzly bear and polar bear characters, they are more a combination of different pieces of clothing I found interesting. The overall direction in these choices is dictated by the "mood" of each reference I used.

In the Grizzly bear, the pointy bloody tone evokes a sense of wildness, mess, and punk, that's why the combination of red tones and torn clothes were chosen. There is also a bit of a "vampire" vibe achieved through the colors of the eyes and teeth. This is just an extra detail but I think it adds a certain value to the vibe.

Black bear and Polar bear characters were combined in some way. I often create an attitude attached to the outfit, for example, black kind of introvert and mysterious attitude and white extrovert and energetic, this time I wanted to make it different by assigning the opposite personality to each value. Being the gothic girl a bit happier and expressive and the white-dressed girl more serious and mysterious. This of course was a personal touch since the original ref for each bear does not reflect that personality. The polar bear looks kind of playful and the black bear very chill and introspective. But hey, from time to time it's good to play around with things.

Last but not least, the values treatment was simpler since I put enough info already in the drawing structure and colors but still kept the "pump overlay" and "color burn" blending mode layers use to create (check the PSD for more).

Conclusion
I did have fun doing these three girls and I hope this helps your process in some way. Again, I'm here to help you develop an efficient way to create art by decomposing my process at its most fundamental level.

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