I adore concept art. It is my favourite part of the production process. Designing characters and backgrounds in a purely experimental capacity allows for creative freedom. As such, I collect art books for animated works I am a fan of. They inspire me in my own practice.

So here are a few which have particularly stuck with me:

Bojack Horseman: The Art before the Horse

Bojack Horseman has a distinctive style which is down to its character artist Lisa Hanawalt. An illustrator and comic artist by trade, Lisa specialises in animal characters-particularly horses. She has had a love of horses since a young girl, so was the first choice when her friend Raphael Bob-Waksburg pitched a show named ‘Bojack the Depressed Talking Horse.’

She said that being production designer “has allowed me to dip into my interest in graphic design…and fashion in a way that I didn’t before, because I’m always looking for new things to do- to differentiate backgrounds or characters from each other.”

Now, the challenge here seemed to be Lisa transferring illustration to animation. She usually works in pens and watercolour, with fairly detailed characters. As Lisa has said herself ‘It’s really hard to het that hand-drawn feel into a show made in Flash and animated by so many different people.” It’s a look which doesn’t translate well to a show which has to be animated by a team. The process for the designing key characters involved a lot of revisions. When designing for TV production, ease of animation and cost is incredibly important. Designs have to be easy to read and to animate. Therefore to incorporate the watercolour origins of Bojack’s design, he is coloured in with a watercolour texture. They are scans of washes that Lisa creates on paper, and overlayed onto characters and backgrounds.

The revisions in character designing actually appeal to me a lot, as it is a process which reminds me of sketching characters in my own personal books, over and over again.

Pixar’s The Art of Turning Red

This book showed me how much personality you need to put into character concept art. The illustrations really quickly give us information about the characters. Mei is clearly high energy, awkward and emotional. Ming Lee, her mum, is prim and proper.

It is really interesting how important colour is in these early phases. Giving each character a general colour scheme is a way to reveal parts of their personality without necessarily having to add more detail to their design.

Since it was a 3D film, character concept art is also done through clay sculpture. This is a technique which Pixar have used since their early days. It’s almost the equivalent of having a reference image, since a 3D artist can then see the character in front of them rendered in 3D. Art Director Jason Dreamer says: “It’s in the sculpting process that a character design really comes to fruition…you don’t really know if a design works until you realise it in three dimensions.” Drawings and illustrations are more suited to poses, exploring concepts quickly and establishing personality/movement. Sculpting is where you find the skeleton of the design.

Honestly, character art is where I wish to end up the most in the animation industry. I get bored pretty quickly, and love experimenting and drawing fast. So drawing those dynamic poses, exploring a character, would be a great fit for me. It’s where the film is at its most un-processed. So many cool concepts for films only appear at this stage, and are lost in the commercial release. Just think of the controversy of Disney’s new film Wish abandoning several characters after the concept stage- resulting in a boring film. I’m always so much more inspired by art books of films than films themselves. I also would love to learn to sculpt, as it would definitely help train my brain to illustrate and animate better.