September 23, 2009

Character Designs: SweetIM Characters

As Tom mentioned in yesterday's post, 2A! has been working on lots of different animated emoticons for SweetIM. For our first batch the client wanted us to create characters that would appeal to women aged 30-45, which was the audience they wanted to target.



Everyone in the studio created strong designs to present, but the client latched onto the extremely cute and saccharine characters that I submitted. I proposed sketches of a cat, a mouse, a moth, a pony, and a little panda for the vignettes. They are all round and curvy in design with big eyes that give an overall cute appearance.



I fleshed out the designs a little more once they were all approved. Here you can see how I explored the cat's face and how she'd look at different angles and expressions.



Then came the color mock-ups, and you can see we played a bit with the colors of the mouse. I wanted to use bright, happy colors and I tried to find a color that brightened up her gray fur. After trying both purple and pink we decided to go with the purple as we felt it was more refined. We also played with adding more eyelashes, but decided "less is more" in this case.



With all the designs and colors approved, I was very excited to begin animating these characters. You can check out all five of our animations by downloading the FREE application at www.sweetim.com. So what are you waiting for?


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