Applying for my character design dream job

hello lexin here today I'm going to be taking you through my process of creating a character design portfolio to apply to what would appear to be my dream job Avatar Studios which is a Production Studio under Nickelodeon just opened up a position for an art trainee open character design positions for Productions in the style of Avatar are extremely rare in America there's really only Powerhouse making something kind of similar and this happens to be the style that I like the most and have spent a long time trying to create in and it is really difficult finding fitting opportunities for it so I had basically just given up on trying to enter animation to be honest like many other people I grew up with Avatar so I mean I don't need to explain why being able to work on a show that shapes your own childhood would be pretty cool that said with how desirable this position is I know so many artists are out there applying for it so if you're watching and you applied for this I wish for you the best of luck everyone who applied whoever gets in I know you deserved it I found out about this application on Monday September 11th and it is due Thursday September 21st so essentially we have 10 days to slap together a portfolio that's gonna bag me my dream job foreign so the first thing I'm going to do is make sure that I understand very clearly what they're looking for all right so I've gone ahead and made this easier to read and highlighted the parts that I think are the most important in the end I think they're looking for somebody who can easily adapt to the existing style of Avatar however they still want to see that you are showing your unique artistic Vision so I think the main challenge here will be to stay in the style but show that you have new ideas too and the most important part about this application is that they've added a space for an optional portfolio where you can design your own character or environment based on Avatar or okoro and they've linked some images as reference so let's take a look at those looking at this I can kind of make a list of all the different things I need in my portfolio I would say a lineup with diverse characters at least one child one teen one adult one elderly person and then of course we need expressions and looking at what we have here I'm gonna say for at least three characters and then turn arounds to prove that we understand forms I would say at least two body and two face then detail call outs as necessary and then over here in the bottom right his character has a pose interacting with another character so I definitely want to show that I can do that pose slash interaction so this is my to-do list for the next week after looking at what they gave us and yeah on the application they said one character but I want to do more because I simply don't have a portfolio for Innovation and if my ideal project is Avatar I might as well foreign is so vast you could design anybody from anywhere so I had to find some sort of framework so I started thinking about my favorite types of characters and Dynamics and one of them is the teacher student Dynamic if you're like me and you're a Shonen an anime fan you grew up with the likes of Kakashi sharaya iruka Sensei Guy sensei Yamato and that's just Naruto you know there's also Reagan and MOB Gojo and itadori Stein and the Soul Eater kids on my indeco the list just goes on anyway I love this Dynamic so I thought it would be fun to design four pairs of teachers and students one from each nation of water Earth Fire and Air so after I figured that out I started to write down some descriptions for each character and with that settled I did a little bit more research I gathered basically every image I could find of character design references from Cora and tar and also a bunch of references of clothing from each nation and that's a wrap for day one I actually didn't do any drawing [Music] turning my text descriptions into a lineup of characters and I was pretty pleased with how it turned out I was able to hit everything I was looking for which was a wide variety of Ages body types genders personalities and different student teacher Dynamics however I did make one major mistake and that is I didn't really explore any other design possibilities for these characters as long as they were diverse enough from each other I felt like my first pass at them was good enough I mean for example if you take the first character the water tribe but Grandma I had in my mind I wanted her to be a short Stout body type character so that means I didn't explore other possibilities like what if she was skinny what if she was a lanky badass grandma like that well that would be a completely different character I guess but what if she had different hair what if she had different facial proportions what if she had different clothes I didn't really explore those things for any of these characters except for for one later on in the process so I kind of feel like I missed out on showing that I could give multiple visual solutions to the same prompt I just think when a portfolio is too polished when everything is too finished and it doesn't show your process of getting to the final it's a little bit suspicious even if you are able to hit the perfect character on the first try you should at least try to challenge yourself in order to show that you can solve this prompt in multiple ways but also don't fall into the opposite camp where you're just like giving tons and tons of variations on things that don't actually matter like when I see people give tons of variations where they're just changing like the color of a character's clothes from dark green to light green I'm like what that doesn't even like do anything for the character if you're gonna give variations you should try to redesign a character completely in order to Showcase a new possibility about who this character could be while still following the prompt so yes this is a regret that I have and I don't want to go back and do variations afterwards because I feel like it's a little bit disingenuous so I'm just gonna take this L and understand that this is something that could count against me foreign speaking of the cast I think it's about time that I introduced you to my characters their story takes place a little bit after the war in the first avatar Series so all the nations are basically at peace and trying to reconcile with each other and these four have met at some sort of conference in perhaps bossing say or somewhere in the earth Kingdom in order to represent their respective Nations the first set of teachers student Duos comes from the water tribes my goal here was to contrast a very Carefree easy going teacher with a serious secretive and conniving student people from the water tribes usually live in a pretty cold climate but since they're traveling they're dressing lighter they both have water skin flasks attached to their body in case they need to water bend at any time and our little Grandma here is also carrying a bag in order to get some souvenirs for her kids and grandkids for the student here I was thinking of making someone very androgynous and ambiguous since gender seemed to play a very big role with the water tribes I wanted to make somebody to subvert that like just no gender like I don't know if they're agender or non-binary but or just ambiguous but something like that just don't perceive them on the gender Spectrum okay or the Earth Kingdom Duo I wanted to contrast a larger than life teacher and a shy and insecure student when I think about the Earth Kingdom I get the impression of a very rigid traditional kind of elitist academic System since there's such a disparity between the social classes so I wanted these characters to break the stereotypes of that system I wanted a chaotic disorganized teacher the type of person to really stress out his superiors so I designed him with Messy robes baggy clothes a lot of facial hair he's picking his ear to show that he doesn't really care about Saving Face the student is this shy easily frightened little mouse hiding behind oversized clothes a mess of hair and a big scarf she would not thrive in the competitive environment that these schools would have but I did want to show that somebody loves her very much and it gave her a little flower hair pin for the Fire Nation I wanted to contrast a very tired teacher in a very enthusiastic student my impression of the Fire Nation is that they're full of very intense prideful intimidating people so I wanted to design characters that were not Intense or intimidating the teachers just very tired she's trying to be put together she cares about fashion and makeup but just can't she's got hair sticking out eye bags a slumped posture for the students she's not really the type of person you would normally picture to be doing fire bending she's got very friendly features and seems very caring and non-threatening this Duo gave me a lot of trouble I was thinking like at this point maybe I should just stop and focus on the Water Tribe and the Earth Kingdom and just give up on Fire and Air I really was not vibing with the student design so you'll see in the in the following days I do make some major changes to her so for the Airbenders we need to do a little bit of ignoring the lore because after the events of the original Avatar there aren't really any Airbenders except for Aang I think in Cora the harmonic convergence happens and new Airbenders start to appear but that's in Korra so let's just let's just do some pretending and say that time is very ambiguous here okay for the Airbenders I wanted to contrast a very Zen and perfect unbothered teacher with just a teenage boy who's like you know a snotty curious teenage boy this kid is kind of fascinated about his teacher he's like there's no way anybody can be this perfect and unbothered he's out to expose this teacher for being a regular human being all right our lineup is done but if we rewind to my to-do list from the first day we still have to do Expressions turnarounds detail call outs and poses so we are really just beginning [Music] technical skill does not equal substance this is the second major lesson I learned while doing this especially when I was doing the line art for all of these characters I was starting to feel like I was using my technical skill as a crutch to mask the fact that I was not being very creative nor was I taking very many risks with my designs at all during this whole process I was pretty focused on being able to hit the style so I spent a long time tracing all the expressions and character designs from Cora these were mostly done by ill Quan Kim jinson Kim and Ki hyungru but then I was like you know these guys they're so good but if the production already has access to them why in the world would they pick me over them if I'm just like a more mediocre version of them so I should try to put some of my personal style and touch into this project and at this point I was not sure how to do this since I had all already finished the lineup the time for exploration was kind of over so the only thing I could do was to go all in on the acting the interactions the expressions and hope that I was able to bring some substance in that area so if you're a student or somebody trying to get into character design I would prompt you to yes develop your technical skills but those skills are just there to ensure that anything you make is fundamentally sound the skills themselves are not the art thank you I finished my lineups on Wednesday September 13th and then I spent the next five days trying to infuse some substance into my characters as somebody who does a lot of comics this is my favorite part of character creation my favorite part about Avatar was how much personality every single character had everybody even the background characters or even the most deranged traumatized characters all had their own charms and were very entertaining to watch interact with each other so my main goal with my portfolio was to be able to capture the same amount of down-to-earth personality that was present in avatar the most dire case of this was the Fire Nation Duo like I said in a previous part of the video I just really wasn't vibing with them at all and I was trying to do some expressions and turnarounds for the students face just to see if I could try to like her better but it just didn't work I think there was something wrong with the pose it was too stiff and too awkward and the forms were looking flat and it just wasn't working for me so I just started from scratch and I decided to do a little bit more research pull up some references from Southeast Asian sources on Pinterest and just try to put more thought into her design specifically I'm much more pleased with her new look and I'm really glad I decided to do it over again The Next Step was to develop the relationship between these two ladies my initial idea was to make the student like a big fan of the teacher somebody who was really enthusiastic and has a lot of energy towards a teacher who is just really tired and doesn't have time for her but the more I drew them together the more I started to think that their relationship was more equal maybe they have some shared Hobbies like fashion and makeup I even thought about what if the teacher was like actually teaching the student how to use fire bending for beauty and they were like in some sort of like cosmetic school or something like that I am quite fond of the pose on the right where the teacher is helping her student dry her hair using some firebending for the water tribe Duo this was the first page that I technically finished and before I decided to go all in with the interactions and acting so this page is much more technical showing that I can rotate an old person's face that I can draw expressions for her and give details on what her old person hand looks like like and give detail shots on how the students water skin mask is tied to their body it's not a full turnaround but I've heard of many character designers say this and I kind of agree that turnarounds are not necessarily that important in a portfolio it is part of the job but it is also just like a technical exercise and if you show that you can draw and rotate forms in your other drawings then I don't really think turnarounds are that necessary unless your character has some special design going on in the back that needs to be detailed I don't really think like a four to eight point turnaround is really necessary the Earth Nation Duo is my absolute favorite out of all of the ones I did I just think they're so silly and these two changed a lot while I was trying to do expressions and interactions for them I think the major change is that the teacher went from somebody who appears to not really care for a student that much to someone who definitely cares a lot almost like a dad would care for his daughter in the beginning I kind of wanted to portray the student as somebody who is really overwhelmed easily somebody kind of like Butchy from Butchy The Rock who has all these crazy expressions and is always anxious and crying but the more I drew her the more I realized this isn't really who she is this is just a little girl who is a little shy but is not being mistreated or grieved on by anybody especially not her teacher for the Airbenders I will admit every time I got to them I was like running out of steam after working on six other characters so it was really just doing my best to get through it and I think you can kind of tell but hopefully I still managed to portray some unique personalities with these two as well I don't know what it is about bald characters but it just really makes me want to draw their eyes like a blob maybe it's the one punch man influence I don't know but I did want to portray this like like pre-teen early teens boy as you know kind of like what soccer was like in the very beginning a little bit sleazy a little bit show coffee kind of a prankster and I was like yeah I think a few full body poses and one interaction I just need to get through this and I'm done so um not my strongest but it's there hello it is Monday September 18th I have two days until the deadline but I have pretty much finished all four of the main sheets I want to do and I've put them on my website and I think they look pretty good next to each other but there's still some more things I want to do I want to do some rough work like do some sketchy pieces where the characters are interacting like between each other like maybe the Earth nation is interacting with the water nation and it's just more clear like how they're under the same theme aside from this I just uploaded my new video and I really enjoy reading the comments on this one I'm glad that it is helping some people um thank you for more than 200k on my last video thank you for 8 000 subscribers and also thank you for 50k on Instagram so thank you for a lot of things oh additionally I also just got our first patreon supporter High fish who is not somebody I already know so thank you so much fish I really appreciate it feeling like we kind of accomplished a lot today so that's why I wanted to give a real life update now originally I had wanted to do some combat poses if you're gonna design Benders you probably want to show that you can draw them bending the elements right but I got really overwhelmed with like how to make this cool how to make this unique I want to combine all these dance moves into it because I like dance what angle do I use and it just all became really overwhelming and I realized like this actually is not substance this doesn't tell me anything new the important thing is to give an overall story for who they are and it's at this point I realized that I was designing students and teachers for a program called Avatar Academy and I was like wow things are coming full circle I designed Avatar Academy characters for Avatar Academy so anyway at this point I was running out of time and patience so I was like I just need to whip something up for a banner let's get one character from each Nation interacting let's make sure there's just an overall visual flow here and make sure everybody's using their elements and we're good I did have a lot of ambitious plans for the extra things I was going to do but then I was like I just got tired it was like I think I did enough I'm going to do this and then call it call it a week and a half in just a bit and I was also getting a little frustrated because in order to do this I wanted to show a style that I wasn't using in the character sheets so I pulled out a book by Sophie Lee who is one of my favorite gesture and character designers and it used her Explorations as inspiration and reference and I was like oh my God I'm doing it again I'm just copying somebody again like why can't I just explore a concept using my own ideas it's so easy for me just to pull up a template over how I want things to look instead of like trying to invent them myself but that's just kind of how I am uh this is something I'll be working on in the future and so despite my trials and tribulations I finished the banner spent some time writing my cover letter and then submitted my application thanks for following along this process with me as of recording still no result I guess I can let you guys know in the comments or something but regardless I'm glad I finally did this and made a bit of a portfolio for the style of Animation that I like the most whether or not I get the job I'm gonna keep making videos if you would like to support me you can check out my patreon or just subscribe or don't subscribe and let fate put my videos on your home screen alright I'll see you in the next one

Channel: qrbits

Views: 987,283

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Id: QuhX6uANoP4

Length: 21min 47sec (1307 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 02 2023