Character experiments

I have been having issues with deciding how the characters in the story should be portrait. Whether they should be human, animal or some morphed creature. A thought had occurred about them perhaps being rather faceless so that the reader can project their own faces onto the characters. After watching a documentary about Antony Gormley and seeing a sculpture titled fields I decided to try his idea and made little characters out of clay as shown below.



I then tried to draw these characters but only using light and shadows as shown below.



This then lead to me using a projector to create shadows from the clay figures, these shadows were then copied onto a sketchbook to give shapes for further experimentation.



The idea of using shapes also lead to trials with alcohol inks, these can be broken apart to try and create characters from. They also can be used for the textures that are created from the inks themselves, overlaying them in photoshop to build both colours and textures.



These types of experiments may lead to nothing, or they may form a set of characters for the story. Without trying I will never know, these experiments and others will be taken further to see where they may lead. If not useful for this particular project they may come in handy in some future project.