CHARACTER: Zoe

For the last few days now I have been struggling to finally define the face of Zoe. I knew roughly the way she would appear in the animation thanks to the storyboard but sketching her actual face proved to be more difficult than I expected.

I originally chose a female lead to set myself a challenge in drawing women and it really was a challenge. Setting myself this challenge was probably a bad idea but even though it’s actually quite possible to swap the gender of my protagonist at this point I have decided against giving up now. So, because I’m not quite ready for a full turnaround I thought I’d post my current efforts.
The sketch below was the first and served basically as a warm up. I loosely roughed in what I thought I wanted for Zoe’s facial features, but really I’m just happy that they kind of look like women...

After some refinement, I finally hit something I liked. You can see it mostly in the character at the top of this next image. This side profile reflects a lot of the characteristics shown in the storyboard. The profile of the girl directly below was also very close but next to the character description she seems much too old.

Then it was a case of turning that side profile around and sketching the whole of her face. Again I was most pleased with the face at the top despite it being emotion-less but it matches the original side profile best out of all of them. In the faces beneath I was playing with eye shapes, but after much thought I decided to stick with a heavy upper eyelid and an upside down semi-circle to get the shape of the eye. It may prove hard to manoeuvre for expressions.

An attempt at simplification and breakdown of proportions. I'm gonna drop the Lisa Simpson hair:

These last three sketches are the most recent. They are not perfect by all means but I am pleased with them to some extent. I had a go at drawing some emotion and I think they look alright, but there is Iess similarity, proportion wise, between them. I anticipate that there will be some difficulty in keeping Zoe on model but hopefully after some simplification and a completed model sheet things should get easier.

Almost there!