Angela’s Father - Character Concepts

I did some research about the characters first before coming up with something. I looked at the way they dressed especially in the 1937 era. So before approaching any specific kind of character design, I drew a few rough concepts just to see in general the basic shapes of the characters.

I started out with Angela’s father first. I drew a few basic shapes of the head to see what works and what doesn’t:

I looked up a lot of references to get inspiration. In particular, I looked up Clemenceau, former president or prime minister of France back in those days. I felt that he had a lot of features on his face that I could use, like wrinkles and loose skin. I also tried creating hats for the characters.

From these sketches, I realised that I liked the one on the extreme right, in terms of the basic shape of the head. Hence, I decided to experiment around that. This is what I came up with:

I came up with the guy on the left. I wanted to avoid doing hair because it would complicate a lot of things when I get down to production. Thus, I tried him bald, but then I realised he looked kind of old. So I tried adding some facial hair, and I felt this made him look slightly younger. The clothes are just a placeholder for now – nothing finalised.

I then tried it with hat and combinations with or without facial hair:

Well, this is it so far. I’m in the midst of dressing this character up. I’ll post that up once I’m done.