For my final year exhibition at Edna Manley College I put together one issue of a comic I had been developing character designs for from the previous year. It's called JamRock Heroes, and it's available online on Tumblr and Facebook. This is the cover featuring the two main characters for this issue Captain Kingston and the Golden Bolt.
Below are the character designs as they progressed through the planning stages. I am showing them in order of decreasing number of overall changes to the character's appearance.
Above is Doctor Bird. He doesn't show up until the second issue - which you can catch the beginning of on Tumblr and Facebook, although it's been on hiatus for a good while now as a result of my employment at my current job.
Because of the character's backstory as being an ex-military doctor fresh off the front lines, I wanted his design to be a lot more practical and not as elaborate as a humming-bird themed costume would normally be treated. My lecturers however thought that it should go in the complete opposite direction, saying that it absolutely needs to be recognizable as a humming bird. I admit that even though I wasn't too fond of this decision, the design I ended up with is way better than the old one in my opinion.
Above is Modda Mobay, she also appears in the second issue, although presently in the story she has yet to. With her design, my lecturers' collective issue was that she didn't seem feminine enough. In their minds it was better that I appeal to the most common denominator in terms of my character designs. In my opinon the original still looked feminine, she just had a really animated looking face. I like how big her cheeks were especially, she looked cute to me. Eventually I followed their advice however and changed her face - among other things - for her final design.
And finally, Golden Bolt and Captain Kingston, who my lecturers had no problem with whatsoever, and I changed on my own. Golden Bolt's design has barely been changed funnily enough.
The style of toning in the comic has gone through many changes and revisions. The issue that my lecturer's had was that I was depicting night-time, which is necessarily dramatic in terms of lighting. Like at night everything is high contrast because the backgrounds are so dark and I should play with that more.
The biggest change was moving from colour to black and white. This was entirely my lecturers' suggestion, although I didn't fight it this time. Turned out way better than I thought.
