Bingomation - 17 Final Character Design - Body

After designing the face of this character, I started to draw her body. Once I had established the basic shape of the shoulders and upper torso, I realised the head I had originally drawn didn't fit onto this body. 

To solve this, I decided to draw another head, but facing straight at the viewer. These two screenshots on the left are a comparison of what I originally had and my final image - I think the second head works a lot better with the angle I drew the body, because you can see the proportions of the character clearly.

The forward facing face compared to my
initial drawing

Once the top half of her was done, I could start to shape the body; I wanted her to wear a skirt and vest top, so once I had marked out her waist I could easily map out the shape of the skirt to have the essence of a ballerina. 

One problem I encountered was where to place her arms. Originally, as shown in the screenshot to the right, I was going to place her arms over the top of the skirt. I decided against this, since in this particular profile I wanted to show the shape of the skirt/outfit clearly.

Following on from this, I could finish off the design with her legs. 

The easiest way for me to get the right proportions on the legs was to sketch where her legs would be under her skirt, to follow on afterwards with the rest of the figure.

Initially, since she is a ballerina, I wanted to place her in a traditional pose; this generally means standing with your legs together and turning your feet outwards. Part of her design was also to have ribbon tied around the bottom half of her legs, to represent traditional ballet shoes. However after drawing it out, I thought the feet looked odd compared to the rest of the body. 

Instead, I tried erasing the ribbons and just having simple shoes (as pictured bottom left) but it still didn't look right, so I edited the feet, which left me with the final result (bottom right).

Overall, I am happy with this design; it's simple, goes well with the style of my animation and should be fairly easy to replicate.