Style - Artist Influences

For Sketch Artist, we chose the artist IdoYehimovitz to influence our character style and Vincent Bisschop to influence our environment designs.

Character Style:

Sketch Artist is heavily dependent on good characterization and humorous visuals to keep our players hooked. Our game’s charm is its strong-point. Because of this, we had to carefully choose a style that would help us made our characters as memorable and aesthetically pleasing as possible. Shape is important for our game mechanic of providing descriptions for the sketch artist to identify a character by, and Ido’s style has great use of shape and exaggerated features.

Ido’s style utilizes thin lining inside of the characters, and no outside outline. We plan to mimic this exact styling in our final characters, which we feel will not only be visually appealing but will also make animating the 2D characters using 3D rigging much easier. The rigs will be made in Maya, and the lack of outside outlines will make the pieces easier to create for each rigged character.

The color if Ido’s work is bright, often utilizing saturated lighter colors and pastels. Along with the lack of an outside outline, these colors will really help the characters pop on top of our background. The game will be released on tablet; we want the characters easily identifiable from the background despite being on a small screen.

The characters will also have shading like Ido Yehimovitz’s, hard lines with no blurring of colors darker than the main body, then some slight gradients to provide texture and draw attention to certain parts of different characters. This will make the animation on animated characters much more seamless and much easier to accomplish (no issues with odd stretching of softer shadows), and also will set the characters apart from the softer-shaded environment.

A lot of our inspiration for our wacky character designs comes from Ido’s amazing character sketches. He has unique caricatures of many different types of people. When viewing his art, some of the designs make you smile or laugh. Our goal with our art is to accomplish the same sense of joy and humor when people view our unique lineups of characters.

Environment:

Our environment will have a softer, more textured appearance, different from our characters. We want it to blend into the background until it’s SUPPOSED to distract you as our distracting game mechanic. With a softer look, we’ll be able to easily direct where we want the player’s eyes to go.

For the backgrounds, we are using inspiration from Vincent Bisschop and his angled, exaggerated structural shapes in some of his art. It’s very stylized and cartoony and feels like it would fit perfectly in our wacky world of our game. The colors are also bright pastels, which we will tone down. We’ll be choosing the more muted tones that you can find in many of Vincent’s art pieces so that the characters stand out from the background.

Vincent’s works have a soft look to them, but defined shadows as if it were built in 3D. We’ll be taking advantage of this and building our background out of 3D, which will then be rendered out into a still image that is edited for the final look. By using a render, we are not polygon limited despite being on a tablet platform and our 3D artist will receive more experience for his portfolio and more freedom in his designs. The shadows and models will be given a slight textured look that softens their appearance. It will resemble paint strokes or rubbed charcoal.

Vincent’s art has no outlines, just blocks of color. Our background, being made in 3D, will look similar as we will not be utilizing any toon shaders. Mainly, our style will be influenced by Vincent's use of shapes, angles, and exaggeration.





Animation:

Our animation needs to have personality! We decided on the style of Tex Avery for animation in terms of characterization and movement. Tex Avery's animations are very exaggerated and the motions pull your eye into the movement. Our only animated characters will be the interviewed characters and then reward animations for picking the correct, guilty perpetrators. The talking characters will be sitting, so their gestures and other movements will need to make up for this. Our style is humorous, and Tex Avery's more humorous style of animating even basic functions and movements will help us make these crazy characters feel believable and appropriately fun.