Independent Practice Week4:Space Pirate Designs

Before going into colouring the before mentioned scenes i get to the point in my projects where i need to freshen my mindset, hence why i chose to do character design for Chris' project and so i felt that need once again. So i decided to do a few character designs for my spaceship, designs of the pirates that would inhabit this spacecraft.
I started to do research into the pirate concept and a pirates dress wear/look and i found that the most common pieces of clothing were the long coat, hat, baggy trousers, belt and much more. There wasn't a vibrant batch of colours as the clothing was more of the dim, matching bits of clothing with few exceptions of colours that stood out such as a red bandanna. Throughout the images there were many skinny pirates, where as when i was told about pirates immediately rounded, eye patch wearing, peg-legged and parrot on their shoulder pirates came to mind and that was one of the specific type of pirates i researched into finding few but close to what i was looking for. Although the pirates had few similar bits of clothing they were unique in their design and that's what separated them from each other.

Here is the character sheet that i had done to use as a guideline:

Character Sheet


Name: Captain Tranz Hurmien


Physical Description

• Male
• 42 years old
• 5'9, Little chubby
• Short dirty, black hair
• Rough black, Beard
• Pirate Hat
• Eye patch-Robotic
• Missing left leg-Robotic

Character Traits

• Focused on his goal
• Gets angry easily
• Wants his own way

Character Background:
Family Background
Orphaned as a child and never learned about his family and where he cam from but took being orphaned in a bad way to which he despises his parent.


Education
Being home schooled in the orphanage and just relies on his space 'smarts', knowing what he knows from what he's heard and seen.


Habits / Vices

• Keeps replaying the past and analyses the faults
• Hides stuff in his beard (treasure map)
• No treasure small or large is a challenge to go after

Personality
Likes

• The adventure, searching for the treasure.
• Alone time
• Treasure

Dislikes

• The Law
• Slacking crew
• Rival Pirates

Motivation:
What is their Goal?

• To get through the day
• Original goal was to secure treasure to pay for his robotic parts but was tempted into the amount of treasure that was available for him to find
• To go after the crew member and get back the treasure

Their plan to achieve Goal

• Drinking and sleeping away the day
• Using treasure maps and common knowledge of space as well as old books

Space Pirate/Ship Story:
The character was orphaned as a child, taking this very seriously he began to despise his parents because of leavign him alone. Later on in life still living with the orphanage he began to get into bad situations to the point where his left eye and leg were seriously injured. From the situation and still being a resident in the orphanage the character hadn't enough money to pay for eye and leg robotic replacements and realised that he had to get alot of money or his injuries get worse.Having to find treasure to pay for his limb replacements whils his injuries were patched up, he managed to find a crew which were needing a captain/ another pair of hands and started to convince the crew into a adventure.
Searching for treasure, coming across minor amounts of treasure one crew member had always been jealous of the Captain getting his role so quickly. One adventure later this crew member became angry to the point where he sabotaged the space pirate ship to crash and rying to kill the whole crew whilst they're in their hibernation pods and at the same time taking the treasure and escaping. Unknown to the escaped crew member the ship has a built in protection system which managed to keep the rest of the crew alive but in low captivity.

After doing the research i had a specific road to my design and that was of the traditional pirate prefix of the pirate being a rounded, eye-patch wearing, peg leg and pirate on the shoulder. So i went forward and used those in the design and again from the research used what was trending throughout all the images of the long coat, hat and baggy clothing. I feel that although this design seems fitting for the fixation of pirates based upon Earth it still suits the pirates within my story to utilise this as the design of the clothing would still suit the setting of space as the pirates aren't exactly rich enough to afford the clothes of that setting but enough money to afford the standard based clothing of the time. With this character design i wanted it to fit the criteria of what everyone would expect but i tried to show that space, technology based background that this character is from by making the left eye and peg leg being mechanical.

The next sketch i had done was in the opposite direction of the design where instead the character would be skinny with a whole different design. With this character i went with a more kind of official look on the pirate side and changing the long coat to a short coat with a long back of the coat and short coat arms.

This time i had a different take on the design of the lower legs where the right leg is fully mechanical to represent a fully working leg but on the other leg its just a mechanical peg leg which refers back to the story where the character needs the money to buy a fully working mechanical leg.

With the third and final design i carried on with the skinnier approach but this time changed the dresswearto being limited. The coat was removed to be replaced with a long sleeved short jacket also adding a larger belt and side weapon. Carrying on with the baggy clothing but this time referring back to the first design with the right leg wearing a boot but the left leg having a mechanical peg leg.

Trimming the beard down to a more menacing look with the goatee and having two tentacles placed upon the hat rather than the traditional bird feathers and this way the tentacles point in the direction of the space setting.


Overall i feel that this fresh design approach had given me more of an inspiration to delve back into the spaceships design and i feel that although this was just a fresh excercise i created three designs which i would like to use, one for the captain and the other two for the crew members. This process opened up more of the storyline as well as the characters background but also gave a broader outlook of the interior and deck of the spaceship, that lived in feel.