Puzzle: Character design

Of my puzzle concepts a number of them featured characters.  It also happened that these three ideas were my favourites.  To inform my character design process I looked at a number of articles online.

 Many of these articles recommend researching and finding reference first.  This is sound advice, but in my case I feel that sometimes this limits early creativity- especially if you already have some idea for your character.  Because of this I began my design process by cleaning and expanding on the designs which were already emerging from my puzzle concepts.

All of these characters have a very rounded look.  Usually I would want to challenge this a bit, but for this puzzle I want the characters to appeal to a young audience.  This lead me to try and emphasise the cuter aspects of the characters as I developed them.

  

Figure 1: Character Initial Concepts

For this project the most useful of the articles I found was this one from creative blog, which talks about designing characters based on animals.  

Some advice that I think will be handy in both this project and upcoming ones is to "employ contradictions", "show some teeth", and not "fix proportions" ("Top 40 Character Design Tips", 2013)

“Bring some contradictions to your characters. A vampire with rounded teeth and big, rounded eyes will look cute, and have a different style from what you’d expect. Try to give your creatures accessories to customise them and make them more human-looking.” -- Jacques Bardoux, Illustrator and graphic designer, Paris, France (Cited in "Top 40 Character Design Tips", 2013).

“If you can see a character’s teeth when its mouth is closed, it looks funny. It gives it a goofy look. Use thumbnails to quickly rough out as many variations as you can think of, and use them to work out how the character will look from different angles and with different expressions.” -- Stefan Marjoram, Freelance animation director, Bristol, UK (Cited in "Top 40 Character Design Tips", 2013)

“Experiment with different shapes and proportions. This can transform a character, the classic example being a big head with a small body and limbs – very cute. However, it’s probably more fun to break away from these rules and have fun playing around with different proportions.” -- TADO, Designers and illustrators, Sheffield, UK (Cited in "Top 40 Character Design Tips", 2013)

The other articles I looked at can be read here: 
 
Burgerman, J. (2014). Retrieved from
http://www.creativebloq.com/character-design/tips-5132643

Clarke, J. (2014). Retrieved from http://www.creativebloq.com/3d/how-design-better-creatures-41411337

Mason, D. (2014). Retrieved from
http://www.creativebloq.com/3d/15-pro-character-design-tips-61412006

Top 40 character design tips. (2013). Retrieved from http://www.creativebloq.com/animation/top-40-character-design-tips-part-1-animal-based-characters-5132659