I see faces: First attempts at character

I tried a variety of different approaches to creating character so as to try and get a feel for both what I preferred creating and what seemed to leave more of an impact. Furthermore I constantly had in my mind what would and wouldn't work, or would be too difficult for my level of skill to animate correctly.

I think my main issue at this stage is that I haven't been quite as exhaustive or methodical in my approach to character design as I could been. Working faster and repeating characters, making adjustments/alterations and trying different poses and action would definitely have helped to flesh out some of these initial design more.

However despite this I think they do still have some merit.

In my mind there are two main issues with the character depicted in these first two spreads. The first one is aesthetic, with my previous thoughts on character design I think the use of a semi realistic face isn't memorable enough to fully hit the brief. Further more this level of detail may be hard to animate to it's full potential, especially in the form of a looping image.

Although still in it's initial design stage I actually like the simple character pictured above. In contrast to the first images I feel it has a certain weight due to how simple it is. The morose almost apprehensive expression is communicated really effectively and directly due to this which gives the impression there is some sort of back story going on.

Much like the first set of characters, i felt this yeti-esque design would be two difficult to transfer to moving image in the why I would want. I had envisioned it walking in a really jolty and awkward manner which, given the constraint of roughly 40 frames I don't think I would be able to animate smoothly enough.

I feel like there is a fair amount of potential with these last two designs. They are relatively simple yet have aspects that would allow them to be animated either dynamically or statically. For example I could see the pattern work/colour of the garments changing in a hypnotic manner or have them move in some sort of repetitive or uniform marching motion.