The Thing In My Pipes – Character Concept Art

I was going through the typical design process for the protagonist that I called Brian because as I was making the storyboards I was listening to the podcast Leighton Night, and the co-host is called Brian Wecht.

I got to the legs and realised that I don’t actually understand human anatomy and how to represent it in pixel art.

I then found this article which explains how to draw anatomy in pixel art.  This method requires way more pixels than I was using.  This website actually looks really useful for learning the techniques I will need for making this animation.

https://www.slynyrd.com/blog/2019/5/21/pixelblog-17-human-anatomy

I’m still gonna stick to the general design of Brian, but I’m going to try to redesign him by repurposing the human anatomy figure that this article shows.

So here are screenshots of me following the above gif.

Now that I have my basic human model, I’m going to customise him as Brian.

When writing the short story that this animation is based on, I imagined Brian as that guy from the popular thumbs up gif, so I’m going to use that as a general reference when designing him.

I want Brian to look like a very regular office worker and kind of bedraggled.  I’m using this image as a guide for his shirt.

Here’s Brian in a shirt.  I was going to add all of the little white lines on the shirt, but then I remembered that I’m going to be animating this, so as simple a design as possible is favourable.

Trousers reference.

And then this is Brian in all his glory.

Seeing as I’m just copying the example in the gif and I’m not actually making my own body from the ground up, I realised that there’s no need to copy the skeleton and muscles, I can just copy the body and save a whole lot of time and effort, so that’s what I did.

For her features and clothes, in the story, I described her as having long black as night hair, red lips and golden green eyes.  I also imagined her having a red shirt and blue jeans.  I used this image as reference for her hair, although it is a different colour.

This is the reference image I used for her shirt.

This is the reference image I used for her trousers.

Here’s Sandra in all of her glory.