Initial character designs (Just some random designs)

The Disney Brief

Character Design - ideas based on clothes and looks

this is a walt disney character design from the artist named Jin Kim.

The reason why I picked this one is because it's a 2 in 1 character

design progress. You can see how he tried to design the King with

different outfits, different hairstyles, slightly different facial features.

And in the end the final design was the last one on the right.

Based on this, I'm going to try to design different canarnyon charac-

ters, with different hairstyles, different facial features and different clo-

thes and based on those designs, I'm either going to combine them

or I'll just pick the one I like the most among them.

Moodboard - Outfits for boys - children

Before getting in to the character outfit designs or physical traits designs, I would like to do a bit of research
on outfits that boys around Canarnyon's age would wear. This will be like an inspiration and would help me design his outfits.

For the hairstyles, instead of looking at real hairstyles fro kids, I decided to look at some cartoons where the characters are around Canarnyon's age and where they are boys.
This is a short list of the cartoons I looked at:
-Titeuf
-Kid Paddle
-Goofy and Max (Movie 1)
-Cedric
-Martin Matin
-The pirate family
-The Simpsons

I'm now going to pick from the different outfits I have looked at, those I really like (I will pick those that might give me inspiration to design my character's final outfit).

1-Pink sweater with grey trousers
2-The red sweater with tie.
3-Striped sweater
4-Short Sleeves T-Shirt with under long sleeves T-shirt
5-Green hoody sweater
6-Striped T-shirt

Why did I pick those outfits ?

Character Design

Canarnyon cloth design

Before designing this character, I had created a story already, because a story helps a lot in developing a good character. Why ? Because as an animator we have to think about what would make a character special, funny, interesting and character traits are often related to stories (or vice-versa) !
So here is the story that I came up with for Canarnyon's character design (The story that helped me in the design of this character). ---> Here is a brief summary of the story.

Canarnyon is 10 years old and very smart, actually he is a genius but he has no choice but to keep it a secret form his friends, from fear to get rejected. Life in school isn't a piece of cake, he always gets the best grades in his year and has made a lot of enemies. Canarnyon decides to create his own gang at school so that he can protect himself and his friends from a rival gang that hates nerds.
He is very smart, very good at video games andat farming (Only 2 of these things are meant to be kept secret, 1: Genius 2.Son of a farmer).


This is a quick summary of what inspired me into coming up with this design and character idea. After thinking a lot, I realized that this idea might be a little bit boring. So I have decided to change everything, I want to turn Canarnyon into a girl instead of a boy, and instead of her being a genius, I want her to be half- witch half fairy with powers.

So here we go, let's turn canarnyon into a girl !!!

Behind the Scene- The new Canarnyon and her story

Initial sketches - Face

How did I come up with this character.

The character design for Canarnyon Girl is a combination of  "Morphing Canarnyon Boy (the first design) into Canarnyon Girl" and two of my favorite animations " Amatrix and The girl who leapt through time"






How did this inspire me ?
The girl who leapt through design was an inspiration to design the character's facial features
and the Animatrix, the colour style applied was what inspired me into designing the charcater's  colouring style and it's environment style.

Face sketches

hair sketches- canarnyon

moodboard- Witch clothes

As animators, it is always important to present a moodboard just about the character itself, so that the client of (whichever person we are presenting the character design to), understand where the character is coming from and what ambiance, atmosphere or style the animator or designer is trying to present. This is why I have created a moodboard for the character's style, world...

Since Canarnyon is half witch half fairy, then after looking at some witch outfits then I decided to look at some fairy outfits.

CAnarnyon Witch-Fairy Final design

This is the witch fairy final outfit design, inspired from various outfit on the mood board, I basically combined them and added my personal touch. (I might to remove some details to it of the client wishes to accept the design, a design should be as simple as possible so that the animation would be made easier.)

Canarnyon Final Design

This is the final design on what Canarnyon would look like in the final animation. Simple plain colours and simple line drawings to facilitate the animators' task.

I thought including some guideklines on how to draw it over and over again would be very useful if the client was to buy the design (The face is mostly composed of circles and triangles, just some basic geometrical shapes. this makes the design much more easier to draw frame by frame and animate).

Character turn around and poses

Of course when designing a character it is always good to have different poses.
So here are some Head turnarounds.

Some character poses, different angles of view or movement, actions are also very useful.

Facial Expressions

While designing a character for either oneself or for someone else to use, it is always important to include expressions (Angry, happy, smiling...). So here are some of the expressions that are unique to Canarnyon.

head turnaround test

Background inspiration

The background design and colouring style was inspired from the Garfield 3D Show (TV series) and Animatrix.
It's a mixture of a £D kind of style with a soft 2D style apply to it (In fact some of the objects in the background are 3D). I wanted to have a different style as requested on the disney brief (A mixture if 2d and 3d is a bit different from most styles).

The technique used to animate

The technique that was used to animate was the what we call "Frame by frame" animation. (Some of the animated parts like (the head rotation of canarnyon) required frame by frame technique, some other parts required wat we call "Cut out" or "Bone" animation. The purpose of the cut out technique is to cut each part of the character and seperate them from the body, and then animate it like a puppet.

Flying dress- Test

For this scene which is part of the animation, I intend to add a Fantasy kind of Sky, before designing the sky I was thinking of looking at some different skies from both the real world and
anime style skies.

And so, here is the final Sky design I personally made for this animation.

The background itself, is a mixture of 3D and 2D colouring and drawing style.

Canarnyon's House Design

The design of Canarnyon's House and world was again inspired from anime style (also with a mixture of 3d for the sky). Canarnyon's world is a very sunny, colourful world where Grey or sadness has no place in it.

Design inspiration source

Canarnyon's street and house design is Japanese style like house.

Now the house design with a sunny outline added to it.

Sunny HOUSE scene

The storyboard for the final animation

A little walk-cycle sample for Canarnyon

another test

Final animation- Canarnyon

This animation isn't like a story (The Disney Brief gave us 30 to 60 seconds), it's just like an opening anime style kind of animation. The purpose of this animation is to show what Canarnyon would look like if animated and what her world would look like. Basically Canarnyon's world is a very colourful type of world, (unlike that of a witch world witch is dark or a Fairy world which extremely fantasy like), her world is stuck between fantasy and real life kind of style.

This is the link to the original animation (High quality) for download.
http://www.mediafire.com/?tbozogm9zkg7hzl