At this point I ultimately know that no matter what my final project pieces are, I want there to be a strong emphasis on characters. I want to represent a digital audience as real people to tackle the sense of separation that many of us feel between reality and digital.
Because of this, I decided that it was really important to start designing characters right away and collect a heap of references to work from. This is because I’m still not completely confident when it comes to drawing realistic characters and normally require quite a lot of references to get the anatomy right. So, to save me the time later on when I’m actually drawing out my final pieces, I simply spent some time designing the sorts of characters that I might add to my illustrated digital audience.
I thought about giving my characters glowing eyes to represent a computer screen – like I did in some of my concept illustrations – but in the end I just don’t think it’s right. I stand by my decision to focus on these characters as real people rather than some alien swarm that people can’t relate to.
alicia hempsted 