Exploratory Practice ~ Designing

Concepting

For this new project we were tasked with designing and creating a character that fits into an existing game IP. My groups chosen IP is ‘Jet Set Radio’ (JSR). During our research and before agreeing on JSR, we were considering other games such as ‘SkullGirls’, ‘Guitar Hero’ and ‘Street Fighter’, all of which also have an interesting and varied cast of characters with really cool costume designs. However, we really liked the art style and general concept of JSR.

The first couple of weeks of the project were dedicated to the initial ideas generation and concepting for the character. Thus I created multiple moodboards to compile my ideas.

Moodboard of other potential IPs (skullgirls, street fighter and guitar hero)

Moodboard of jet set radio and other games with similar style and concept (bomb rush cyberfunk and lethal league blaze).

Through my research I also found two games that were inspired by JSR and have a similar style and concept to the game – ‘Bomb Rush Cyberfunk’ and ‘Lethal League Blaze’, which will also help me with ideas for my character. I mostly focused on the female characters of the games when compiling the moodboard, as I want to create a female character as well.

Moodboard of 90/2000s Japanese fashion – mostly from ‘Fruits’ magazine.

Moodboard of cyber girl/ cybercore fashion.

Since JSR is a japanese game made in the early 2000s and includes a lot aspects of J-fashion within in character/ costume design, I decided to focus on looking at Japanese fashion from the 90s and 2000s for my character design. I was mostly looking at the Japanese fashion magazine ‘Fruits’, which features street snaps of people with interesting outfits, this was really helpful and inspiring for the potential costume design of my character. I also looked at cyber girl/ ‘cybercore’ fashion, which incorporates traits of cyberpunk styles – as I also wanted to give the character an updated look compared to the original JSR game.

I started to think about the attributes of my character regarding personality, name and some physical aspects. The characters of JSR are mostly made up of Japanese teenagers, so I chose to base my character on that. I used some name generators to come up with a short Japanese name, as the characters all also have short, simple names – the main characters are called Beat, Gum and Mew. I also used character personality generators to come up with some interesting personality traits for my character – this helped me when creating her as I feel like personality is a significant thing in influencing visual appearance.

Name: Suko

Age: 19

Race: Japanese and American

Personality: Funny, energetic, dramatic/diva, charming, unpredictable/impulsive

Alignment: Chaotic neutral

Designing

I started designing my character with some thumbnails of the face and hair. I was sure that I wanted her to be wearing a bunny hat – inspired by a certain image from my moodboard, and I experimented with different hairstyles and accessories. ↓

Then I drew an orthographic view of the character base, including the hairstyle I liked the most – adding the goggles. ↓

With the base of my character done, I sketched out some outfits idea thumbnails – not including the skates as I wanted to leave that till later. I wanted to make sure it looked like she could actually skate and move around in the outfits, so they are based around short bottoms and other details of accessories on the legs. I also added some staples of things I always like to draw on my characters – like stars, leg warmers and plasters. But I’m glad the plasters also have cohesion to the IP as she would likely be getting some injuries from skating.

This is the final outfit and skates design that I decided on – pretty much combining aspects from all of my ideas. ↓

I decided that I wasn’t really the biggest fan of this design and how it turned out, I also thought that the hat and hair was too similar to the main character of the game – Gum. As she also has a hat with straps coming down and the pieces of hair peeking out the side. So I changed the design. I now wanted to create a somewhat ‘gyaru’ character. Gyaru is a Japanese fashion subculture that was at its most popular in the 2000s in Japan, so I thought this fit perfectly with the game and its time. I created another moodboard based on gyaru fashion – hair and outfits. I also included some images of Japanese school and PE uniforms as I thought this may be an interesting idea to explore for my character too.

I created a new design for the face and hair and coloured that, including aspects of gyaru fashion – like coloured hair with accessories, tanned skin and white makeup on the eyes and nose (as shown in my moodboard). I still wanted to keep the hat/googles combination in this version, and again I was inspired by a specific picture this time being of the leopard patterned hat. I then made some more outfit ideas, taking aspects of my previous designs and moodboards whilst staying loyal to the gyaru and Japanese school uniform styles (Japanese uniforms are also an aspect of gyaru fashion – this is called ‘kogal gyaru’). I much preferred this iteration of my character and was happy with the new designs. It also conforms with my characters personality more, as gyaru girls are known to be particularly outspoken and fun-loving when compared to the average Japanese woman (of course this a bit of a generalisation, but just something I thought about).

I then started to think about colour combinations for my characters outfit and used the website https://coolors.co/ to create some colour palettes – I knew that I definitely wanted to use green though so I put that in and based it of that colour. There is a lot of green, blue and yellow used for the characters in JSR so I wanted mine to have a similar colour scheme. I ended up going with the first colour palette – with some exceptions, but it was very helpful as a base.

I usually struggle a bit with coming up with ideas for and drawing shoes, so I made another moodboard to help me with designing the skates. This included a lot of reference of skates from the game and some interesting looking platform shoes that resembled skates. Despite the skates in JSR being pretty detailed and complicated, I chose to make them quite simple anyway as I knew making them really detailed wouldn’t be helpful during the modelling/animating process. Through this research I also found an original character based off of JSR that I though was really cool so I added it to the moodboard and it acted as inspiration through the project. (link to the Artstation post – https://www.artstation.com/artwork/13kae)