Introduction

Hello, my name is April. I am 19 years old studying the Games Art at Confetti, Nottingham Trent University. I am passionate about creating and inspiring others with my work. I do digital art as a hobby with a goal of becoming a character artist, however, I would like to generally work in the creative industry. My online handle is @aprilbunnyboo on almost everything!

I would highly recommend checking out my online portfolio that I made in 2023 when studying VFX and Animation!

Pre Arrival Task

Before starting at NTU, I was tasked with designing five hero/villain self-portraits as well as research an art style. In this blog post, I will go over my research on the manga art style as well as designing a couple heroes and villains and my thoughts on them.

 Manga Research 

I have decided to research about the manga art style as it is very popular. The art style is very unique, it is portrayed differently between artists and has been developed for centuries, oldest dating back to the 1800s. The most defining characteristics of this art style are the pointy hair and wide, sharp eyes. 
 

There are different styles of manga, such as shonen, shojo, seinen, josei, and kodomomuke. These are different from genres, but are labels which tell what audience the manga is suitable for. Shonen manga all focus on a young male hero, with female young heroes becoming popular within Shonen too. This type of manga focuses on action, adventure and fighting. Seinen markets towards older adolescents as manga of this type tends to be more psychological and violent. Shojo focuses primarily on female personal relationships, it is often of the romance genre and has a younger female target audience, aged between ten and eighteen. Kodomomuke has a generally younger target audience, most notably, specifically targeted at children, teaching them morals and core values, a great example of this would be Pokémon. 
 
The most sold manga is One Piece, with over 516 million copies sold with a 4.7-star rating, going as far to have a Netflix adaptation of it, due to its popularity. It is estimated about 90% of adults have read the One Piece manga despite the target audience being for young adolescents, aged 14+. This is likely because the One Piece manga and anime has been in production since 1997 and is still ongoing, which keeps the older audience, who grew up with it, engaged. 
 
The manga demographic overall consists of millennials 42% and adult gen Z 25%. This is because manga tends to portray more mature genres. Mangas such as Tokyo Ghoul, Death Note, Black Lagoon, Chainsaw Man, The Promised Neverland, Beastars all have very mature topics with dark themes, death, crime, thriller, psychological, and potentially horror. Less mature manga with lighter themes such as Studio Ghibli style also appeal to all audiences, with younger audiences in mind. 
 

My favourite manga is Death Note, the art style is phenomenal and has a compelling story. My opinion on this manga is backed by the community who also adores this manga. To date, the manga has a 4.9-star rating, with over 10 thousand reviews. Death Note has very unique character designs. The main target audience for Death Note is adolescents and young male adults. 

 Character Designs

This is my first character design, The Poltergeist.

While designing my first character, I wasn't very sure what I wanted to design so I experimented with normal form vs villain form, inspired by the popular manga/anime, My Hero Academia. The gloves were inspired by the usual cartoony gloves in '80s cartoons.

My second character, Cyan Flame.

I drew Cyan Flame on Clip Studio Paint, trying to experiment with a fox-based hero. Since my first character was a villain, I wanted to create a hero this time. I went to the full length of simple shading and glowing tail. I attempted to draw glowing eyes, however, for the character design sheet, I wanted to keep it simple.

Concept art of my hero, Aster.

With Aster's design, I wanted to create a more detailed design with great detail but kept the workload down to a sketch. I am very satisfied with this design. I was inspired by Rosalia from Bloons: TD 6, with the ray gun and jets. I wanted to go for a starry theme, hence her name being Aster (short for asterism). I would love to develop this design in the future.

Cerasus the Moth concept art.

I created Cerasus spontaneously, I thought "What if I created a moth hero?", so I decided to base this design off my favourite moth species, the rosy maple moth, because of its bright colours and adorable fuzzy look. I wanted to develop Cerasus's personality a bit more but didn't include it in the character sheet. However, I would like to think that Cerasus is very shy, similar to Flutter Shy from My Little Pony. I feel like the sketch was a bit rushed, but I am very happy with how the colours turned out. I used a watercolour brush to colour my character, to make the appearance soft and fragile. One thing, I want to improve about this design, is to make the neck fluff look more fluffy rather than rigid, and I could definitely achieve that with the watercolour brush.

 Character Design - Timelapses

Reflection 

 

What Went Well... 

I found this task to be a great learning experience by experimenting with new character designs. In my opinion, I did a really good job on the character designs and portrayed the villains and heroes distinctly.  

 

Even Better If... 

This task could’ve turned out better if I had brain-stormed some ideas and created moodboards and references before going straight to creating my heroes and villains because I struggled at creating their designs. I think if I had observed other hero/villain character designs, I would have a better grasp at how to create one of my own. 

Challenges 

My struggles with this task were the self-portrait aspect of the task, as I usually draw anthropomorphic animal characters, as opposed to human characters. I am still developing my art style on human characters, however I found that this task was especially beneficial for better improving my human character art style. I am not well versed with drawing different hair styles, so it was tricky designing something I have little practice in. Despite that, I improvised to fit the criteria of the task. 

Future Changes 

I would really like to experiment with more anthropomorphic characters as I really enjoy drawing them. I think there is a lot of potential that I’ve missed out on by not drawing with my usual style, so I would love to incorporate that into future designs. I would also really like to create more shaded pieces. Unfortunately, due to the constrained time limit, I could only focus on simple character designs. In the future, I will strive to create more detailed design choices. 

Most Enjoyed 

I really enjoyed the creative aspect of the task. I have not drawn heroes/villains before so it was a refreshing experience and gave me the motivation to delve out of my comfort zone from my usual art.  

Most Disliked 

The aspect I struggled with the most was finding inspiration for my character designs which I think made them lack in character that I failed to portray. I didn’t like the way the glowing eyes on Cyan Flame’s design turned out as they don’t appear to glow as well as they should in the drawing.