Critical review #7

Chand, A. (2016). Breathing Life into a Character: Conceptual Tools for Understanding the Relationship between Illustrator and Character Design.

The paper started with an explanation of the connection between character design and illustration. Personification is part of an illustration and visual communication. Illustration translates to experience this paper state, which hopefully will relate to the audience through observed similarities with their own experience. If the audience takes part of human-like, the individuals tacitly negotiate the world, and their interactions with other people, through the interpretation of aesthetics, physiology, psychology, socio-economic class, and culture- then the design of the character and interpret that into a character design further reflexive relationship between the illustrator, the character, and the audience. What this paper wants are to examine the implicit role of an illustrator’s habitus in making the character and provides tools to generate the aspect based on an individual.

The narrative is a big role in character design, based on this paper. Designers or illustrators must have an understanding of how to develop fictitious characters that translate and communicate with lived experiences. The habitus is an enigmatic concept, in the design concept, it forms a synthesized embodiment of the complex nature. Storytelling is part of an illustration, it should translate into a situation, so it enables a further understanding of the context of the character —time, place, and culture—including the individual. Individual narratives are bound by the social-economic-cultural climate or situation. Character design is mainly focused on making qualities of the human experience, through an aesthetic to a character that has functionality, goals, mannerisms, habits, and worldview, to an audience. As an example, the author observes the general human situation in three Pop culture from the 20th century: Donald Duck, Homer Simpson, and Astro Boy. Historically speaking Donald Duck is a war-theme character, he has features of an all-American hero set, with an American Sailor motif that describes a stoic, comedic, callous, and prankish. To this day, Donald Duck has many adaptations. Homer Simpson on the other hand is created for an American animated sitcom in 1987-1989. Astro Boy; a non-American character, developed in Japan in 1952 it shows concerns, interests, and curiosities surrounding Artificial Intelligence and the possibilities of futuristic technologies.

In the conclusion of this paper, the aspect of illustration and the character design are related to; physiology, sociology, and psychology. Physiology is part of their appearance and distinct features (sex, age, height and weight, color, etc.). Sociology are more toward the status, such as class, occupation, education, family life, religion and race, nationality. Lastly, its psychology covers the behavior, moral standards, sex life, goals, ambitions, frustrations, disappointments, temperament, attitude towards life, complexes, obsessions, imagination, judgment, wisdom, taste, poise • extrovert, introvert, ambivert, intelligence.

This paper is a qualitative one, using the discussion of the relationship between illustrator and character design set out to identify some conceptual tools that can help the readers. The author emphasizes the influence of narrative in character design is big and illustration must be able to translate that, by reflecting ideologies, mythologies, and situations. Including some short case studies help to highlight the author’s point about illustrator’s habitus and its perception of the world, it clarifies the role of the concept generation and embodiment of experience to image. It shows the surrounding of the character; historical, sociological, and philosophical concepts. It’s a great paper to read. It shows that there are a lot of proven studies that character design should not only focused on the aesthetic aspect of it but the character design is part visualizing a narrative and it must fulfill that. In this paper, it provided what successful character traits have, physiology, sociology, and psychology also backup by the case study the author provides with and research of previous studies. All in all, a really informative paper.