Following my research into League of Legends, I conducted further research into female characters that more accurately represent the average female, and not a perfect girl with a stick-thin figure. I thought it would be best for me to create a moodboard of the range of characters that I researched/found, as I would be able to easily pick out the features of that character that make them more realistic or representative of females. I started with the characters from LoL that deviated from the usual "all boob" female, along with Merida from Brave whom I had looked at in great detail in my essay.
Female Character Moodboard
Lilo and Stitch in my opinion is another great example of accurate female representation. Nani, Lilo's older sister, has a much more realistic body shape, as she has a bit of a belly and muscular thighs. Not only this, but she is a strong-willed character who tries her very best to raise Lilo on her own, which to me is widely overlooked and I think Nani deserves more praise and recognition than what she gets, especially considering that Lilo is far from being a perfect child. She throws tantrums and makes it hard for Nani to care for her. She also deviates from the average "girly-girl" as she doesn't like playing with dolls, and has a much more creative imagination which the other girls in her class tend to bully her for as they find her "weird". So not only is she a girl that doesn't fit in with the crowd, she also has a much more healthy body image, much like many characters in this animation.
I wanted to stray away from Disney again a bit more, as I wanted to look at a wide range of characters, so began to look at Studio Ghibli. I had only ever watched Spirited Away, and it's only recently that I have watched his other animations. First of all, they are all visually stunning. Secondly, I love that the plots and the characters are so imaginative and different to most films I have seen. It was a nice change to the usual plots that I'm used to watching. I was particularly blown away by Howl's Moving Castle and I'll most likely rant on about how amazing it is at a later date, but at the moment I'm going to talk about Sophie. Sophie truly is an average girl and is depicted as being quite ordinary. She doesn't even see herself as being beautiful or attractive. She is instead quite plain but is very kind, polite and friendly. It also a good example of an animation where the old woman isn't drawn as an "old hag" and depicted as being ugly. Instead she simply gains a few pounds and a couple of wrinkles on her face.
Mei and Satsuki from My Neighbor Totoro are also great female characters. I particularly like that Satsuki isn't a typical girly-girl, instead she has short hair like a "tomboy" and has a lanky figure. Yes she is thin, but it isn't the typical hourglass figure that is usually favoured in animations. Then we have Mei. Similarly to Lilo, Mei is chubby and very adventurous.
I then looked into Jamie Hewlett's character designs, in particular Tank Girl. I've always been a fan of Hewlett's art style/his works, so I'm quite surprised that I haven't come across this character before. This girl deviates massively from the common stereotypical look and personality that is often given to females, as she has next to no hair, face piercings, weapons, and generally looks aggressive. This character gave me the idea of looking into different stereotypes concerning personalities, such as goth and "nerd" etc, as not only will this give me a variety of different character designs, this will definitely be representative of a lot of different females. This could be a good route to go down, so I shall bare that idea in mind.
Body Shape Moodboard
Having collected a good amount of research and accumulated a good idea of what representative female characters look like and what their features are, I figured it would be a good idea to begin drawing my own characters, drawing from my research and further examples if needs be. I gathered together a range of different body shapes and created a moodboard to aid my drawings.
No comments:
Post a Comment