Face progression, horns and angle gamut.

The face of Thor

I've gone through a bunch of drawings today and have settled on a face and therefore the style guide for my characters. This first page I found the character to look too much like a girl which actually made me stop and consider putting that forward, or possibly the option of a unisex character. Doesnt matter though because I'm sticking with the boy idea.

Amazingly, all I had to do was take the hair up a bit and suddenly it looked more like a boy, I also angled the jaw a little better as well as softer features are generally more feminine, especially a tapered, heart-shaped head. So yeah, I pronounced the chin and jaw line a little more and took up the hair. Its not quite finalized yet but I like the overall silhouette which means I can start modelling. Also a quick thought on all these horns, perhaps I could have that as a customizable feature.

That masked 'man mode power' face was initially just dabbling with covering up the face however I like the idea of a 'power up' which are popular in design (perhaps cliché), whereby what happens is when Thor gains enough, lets say rage, he can activate 'man mode' and suddenly this mask drops over his face and he is ready to go to work.

The design choice here is that because this story is about coming of age, becoming a man, Thor's power gives him a mask that has a bearded face on it cast in metal so as to be metaphoric of becoming a man briefly. Though to say being a man is about cracking skulls is pretty shameful, I just want a bit of fun in the design because Thor cant grow his own beard yet, he must where his Mask of +10 Manliness.

This is something I found interesting to apply, I'm not so well-versed in compositional techniques however I believe this is called an 'angle gamut' whereby you limit the amount of angles you use in your paintings which, if I'm not mistaken, adds an underlying consistency and repetition to the painting that works as a coincidence - by which I mean it ties everything together creating relationships between parts of the painting.

As you can see I'm only using four angles at the moment, I'm unsure if I'm doing it correctly yet I'm happy about doing it because I'm consciously deciding on all angles, not just waving my stylus around willy-nilly.