Chris Oatley Visual Development tips

I have been following character designer Chris Oatley for a few years now, and I always find his tips helpful. Recently he posted a series of tips that talk about creating a competetive Visual Development portfolio.

Here are my notes on the series;

Three Essential Steps To Become A VisDev Artist:

1. Pick a story.
2. Get a pencil and a piece of paper.
3. Develop the story visually.

A lot of aspiring Vis Dev artists practice drawing/painting but not the specific process of visual development. 

VisDev artists don't need anything more than a sketchbook and pencil.

Explore the entire imagined world; characters, props, environments etc. Explore colour and lighting.

Act hired before you get hired

Every piece should respond to a question about the character. Asking hyper specific questions of your character and responding to them through visual development show much more of your character's personality. Show this throughout your portfolio.

Get to know your characters as well as you know your best friends

If your environments don't mean anything to any of your characters, they won't really matter to the audience. Not every specific detail needs to be important to the character, but every place in the story should matter to the character in some way.


TASK - Who lives here?
Design a character without designing a character; communicate the story of a character through a drawing of their personal space. Try to answer as least 10 questions about your character through this one drawing or painting. Bonus - show that the character leads a double life.

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I definitely want to try this task this summer - I think it would be great both for developing characters and practicing drawing backgrounds and spaces, since I don't do that too often. It would be nice - although very ambitious, to create something like Studio Mappa has in the opening for their show Punchline; 

I would need Maya to rotoscope over, although I could just design a room then create it in Maya, but I would like to help my drawing skills more. This would maybe be part of a project then for third year, but designing rooms and places that link to characters will be a very good task, and I can also think about angles and lighting.