Character design

Today we have a workshop which is learn about character design. Our lecturer use Pokemon as a case study. I was not a person who like to watch Pokemon. I never tried to play Pokemon game before.

There were 893 character in Pokemon. In this workshop, our lecturer will talk about literal inspiration, anthropomorphism/pareidolia, Japanese culture, other culture, and combination.

Literal inspiration

- You can know what the character is when you see it

Anthropomorphism

- Giving human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities

Pareidolia

- The tendency for incorrect perception of an object/pattern, e.g. seeing faces in in abstract pattern or inanimate objects

Japanese culture

- The design idea of the character is come from Japanese culture

Other culture

- The design idea of the character is come from other culture

Zoology

- The design idea of the character is come from actual animal

Combination

- The characters combine with different cultures, different animals or different plants

After the lecture class, we had a workshop. We were asked to separate into groups and tried to design a character for Pokemon.

Here was what my group designed:

The idea of our design was came from Erlangshen, a Chinese god with a third truth-seeing eye in the middle of his forehead. He has a which named howling dog. As you can see, the character actually was a dog, and we tried to put some clothes on it. The clothes actually was taken by Erlangshen, and also we added a third truth-seeing eye in the middle of its forehead. The reason why the third truth-seeing eye was in moon shape was because we use the idea of eclipse. For Chinese, eclipse was also called dog eat moon. That's how we tried to relate the dog and the moon together.