Behind The Scenes: Isabella 3D Character (Patreon)

Time for a new character! I really love, when I find some time to create a new character, as it's a bit more time consuming than my usual work. After the Clementine, I wanted to do a new female model, because with Clementine I felt a bit all over the place. Like I couldn't decide if she's a cartoon, or just stylized character. So this time, I went for really cartoon design from the start.

I had the idea for the adventurer before, when I stumbled upon Indiana Jones trailer, and put the explorer character in my list right after the sci-fi scientist guy. And since I was looking for a female character this time, I just translated the idea and started gathering references, that had to do something with a treasure-hunting tomb-dwelling and trap-avoiding adventurer. 

Visit the full Pinboard here

So my first obvious choice for the reference was Indiana Jones with his cool hat and whip. I mixed it up with Lara Croft and started to search for some adventuring gear to spark up the creativity. I really loved the cartoon of Indy and Lara fighting over the idol and at the same time, I loved the cartoon stylization on Lara there.

And that led me to most difficult exploration, finding the right cartoon and proportions references for a female character. There is a lot of good sketches for a body poses out there, but most of them are proportionally accurate. I was looking for a more distorted cartoon style, with really small body and larger head and legs. After few successful hits, I included a sketch for a face expression and got ready for a sketch.

I think I already mentioned, I don't like to sketch characters. It's really hard for me and I have to do several rounds to get close to something usable. And this time I put aside the notebook and pencil, and used iPad with Apple Pencil instead. So as you can see, it's not about being a hero and acting like I can put a beautiful sketch at first shot. It's about getting from A to B in a least painful way and using whatever tools you got.

To prove my point, I can now include a Procreate time lapse of the sketch process, so you can see for yourself, how ugly it got at times :D

You can see I have included the most important adventuring gear and focused on body proportions. I wanted Isabella (I googled the list of girl baby names for adventurous parents, I expect some pretty interesting retargeting ads) to look girly and cute, but at the same time like she's able to pull her weight in tight situations. That's why she has really small and lean torso and hands and the larger legs are meant to suggest that she's really athletic, when it comes to jumping, running and climbing.

I was really short on time while modeling, so in the end I decided to drop a whip. I kinda figured it's not that necessary and that I don't need to go so much Indiana Jones in the end.

That wraps the insights for my new character illustration this week. Thanks for reading and I hope it will help you with some of your projects.

Cheers!