Narrative - Fish Character Development

After creating the bulk of ink thumbnails for our fish character, I took what I felt were the strongest silhouettes and altered them using the fin designs I had also created. After talking to the group, we all agreed that thumbnail 4 had a lot of potential. As such, after discussing what tweaks could be made to improve it, we have ended at something that can now serve as the core reference for our character concept and orthographic.

Set of Refined Thumbnails

Fish Thumbnail with Alterations

Final Tweaks

Narrative - A few more refined thumbnails

After talking to the group about my previous thumbnails, I created this smaller set. I started with simple brush strokes and shapes and expanded on them to make coherent fish designs. I feel like this is a step in the right direction and I think that my next step will be to take my existing thumbnails and combine them in Photoshop to create interesting designs.

 

Narrative - Fish Character Thumbnails

I have created a series of thumbnails to try to find the definitive design for our fish character. I have used ink as I felt I could use some of its properties to my advantage. I used some of the ink thumbnails to create some interesting fin designs for our fish as well.

 

 

 

Thumbnails 1-10

Thumbnails 11-21

Thumbnails 22-33 (Fin Designs)

Thumbnails 34-50 (Fin Designs)

Thumbnails 51-61

Thumbnails 62-69

Thumbnails 70-86 (Rough Ink Shapes)

Thumbnails 87-98

Fish Body Thumnails

As our current story will be quite metaphorical overall, we have decided to create fish characters that would be read as a general fish, not as a specific kind of fish. Below I have created some thumbnails of early ideas for the overall shape of our fish. Many of these are quite rough and are just there for ideas for further concepts.

Pufferfish Design Ideas

I decided today to do some concept art for the project's pufferfish protagonist. As far as is known to science the only known species of puffer that makes the patterns in the sand that so inspired us is Torquiguener albomaculosus, more commonly known as the Japanese white-spotted puffer.

     Although I have not entirely nailed down a specific design, I decided to make a pattern contact sheet. Even if this is not the form that sticks, I hope these designs can remain transferable. I looked into making something distinct and perhaps show our fish might be creative in some way. But because of the inspiration I also looked into making something that could be described as cute. So I'm not entirely satisfied with designs 1 2 and 3 on the upper panel.

Fish and Environment Thumbnails

    Not the cleanest things but I drew some thumbnails today to get an idea for the narrative. As a bright and colourful world it might be best for the characters themselves to be just as expressive. They can be colourful, but also being expressive would be very useful.

    It's not just the colours or the fish though, patterns could also be useful to portray the world. And even if we kept these minimal there are the patterns like the circles blowfish make to attract mates. Patterms could therefore be an important factor in the creation of the world.

Cleaner shrimp character thumbnails

The idea of the cleaner shrimp is to be a backup character, my personal favourite is 5 but prefer the pattern of 2.