Simplifying My Character

After realising that I needed to make my character much simpler, I got straight to it. One of the things I needed to think about was also making her look more compatible with Ollie's robot. So to begin with a played around with making her facial features much similar to his.

Ollie recommended I looked at the character design for the Video Game, "Splatoon" because similarly to his character, the characters in this have shapes around their eyes which join together above the nose. I thought this might give our two characters a bit more unity.

However, after some sketching, I realised how it was a tricky aspect to add to this character because it didn't have the desired look, especially because she will first be seen coming out of the water; it will just look like goggles, which is not what I want!

I did however, continue to play about with the shape of the eyes, and came to the conclusion that if they were more rounded instead of angled, it could help this character fit into the story a bit better, because there would be more of a similarity.


I decided that the overall shape of the mermaid needed simplifying, especially the tail. I don't think there is much point putting tons of time and effort into the detail of something that isn't going to be seen! I have taken away all ridges on the ears and fins and smoothed everything down, as well as the hands which are now basic flippers.


Why?
 The reason all of this simplification was necessary, is because originally both characters looked as though they were from completely different stories. Also, I was being a tad over ambitious with the amount of modelling I was setting myself to do in Maya, considering I am not yet super fast at it!