I wanted to write up a little update on my child, my bestie, my wonderful moody pumpkin teen. Since I last worked on her design I feel like I’ve been so focused on animating that I forgot how much I love crafting a character. At this point I have an entire backstory for this zany girl. I might be biased, but I feel like experimenting with expressions and posing really brought her to life and rekindled my affection for her character. After experiencing animating with her too, I think I did a pretty good job with her level of complication, and didn’t run into any huge issues with animating her, even with the dress, which I was surprised by.

It’s made me think about relatability of characters. When Robert from NFTS came in he spoke on it in his lecture too, but it’d about “do we see ourself or others in this character?” If a character has no heart, even a comedy character like this gal, we cannot feel our humanity in them, and that’s what makes us enjoy and relate to a character.

Since working on her I’ve also been told that the style reminds multiple people of shows like Adventure Time and The Midnight Gospel. I haven’t watched Adventure Time, but The Midnight Gospel is one of my biggest inspirations for animation so I am extremely flattered. I looked into the company Titmouse, and they run internships every year! I’d’ve loved to have applied, but they are fully unpaid, which just isn’t viable for me right now. They do seem to put up a large amount of remote animation jobs though, such as this Animate CC one, so I will run it past the tutors to see what they think about my skill level at this point!

I am still unsure about if it is realistic for me to pursue character design as a career path. Ideally I would like to do both 2D character design and animation, but I don’t know how viable this is. Do I need to find my niche? not try and have my fingers in too many pies, so to speak. I want to reach out to some character artists I admire and get their two cents on this, as they are the best people to ask really!