Character Design - Spider

Spider Design

Having been toying with the idea of a spider character for a while now, I did a rough sketch last night using a Biro in my note pad. At the time it didn’t seem like it would come to anything, but it actually led to my finished concept of the character:

Initially I had planned to completely colour over the scanned biro lines, but in actuality they seem to add something extra to the characters armour. Maybe it is due to the whole ‘primal’ feel of the fur and striped undercoating? Never the less I quickly glanced at some reference materials to add to the Spider theme.

Key areas I looked at in the design were:

Black Widow Spiders: I found that they had a simple black colour scheme, but had a unique orange Hourglass symbol on their backs – I wanted to incorporate this somewhere in the design (settled on the shoulder plate). I was tempted to shift the colour of the character to black, but I wanted the character to be red (the traditional Red V Blue theme that has run in many games (Pokémon, Halo, etc.)).

Spider Eyes: I looked at several different images before settling on this particular image to base the head piece from. It just looked right, and I was happy with the end result as it definitely illustrated the theme.

[The reason that this image is not  up on the blog is that the owner of the website specifies on the home page that he doesn't allow use of his pictures other than linking them, which is a shame.]

While I didn’t use reference materials for the fur, I did want the four strands to resemble spider legs so they we large, black and curled.

When I showed the initial image to friends, the criticism was that it wasn’t clear that the fur was meant to resemble spider legs, and that the metallic headpiece would probably look better as the same colour as the armour. I took this on board and made the necessary changes. This was the end result;

Looking at it now, I am really happy with how it turned out and it almost exactly resembled my initial thoughts about how the character would look. Furthermore, as an artist I feel that although I am still inexperienced with digital rendering, that I have progressed a large amount from my earliest work.

If I have time, I would like to continue with some more character designs (a crocodile/alligator design and a goldfish character?)