Poppi the Weasel: A Journey Through Design (My Character Design Process)

Poppi the Weasel is a character design idea I imagined when I was in University, while studying “Visual Design” and “3D Design”. Poppi was inspired by early 3D Platformer mascots from the 1990s and onwards. Games, such as: Spyro, Crash, Kao the Kangaroo, and so on. They all played a part during the Idea Generation stage of the design process of this character. After learning that “Characters make the story, story doesn’t make characters” (Level Up, S Rogers, Jul 6th 2010), I started thinking about the journey of the character to wrap a story around.

In this post, we will be exploring the brief background of Poppi the Weasel and how I design characters as a whole, sharing what I have learned through University and my own initiative

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The Story Behind Poppi the Weasel:

Poppi is an over-confident, witty and young child who is always up for playing around. She can be serious when she has to be, but always thinks that being serious is boring. However, she is also caring, warm, and friendly (especially to those who are kind towards her). She is not a natural being, but artificial. Like all things in her world, everything is made with a purpose. Her purpose, for example, is to keep the harmony of the world in balance through her given powers of “Music Flow”; the ability to rearrange and organize note patterns. With this rough story behind us, it is clear these elements need to reflect on the design of the character.

Idea Generation:

Character Silhouettes

In the beginning of the character design process (that I do personally), I start by getting a piece of paper and pen and simply draw random body formations without using much thought to get ideas flowing. Below is an example of this idea generation method:

Silhouettes are a good way to get ideas down on paper to work from as reference. I usually spend about 5-10 minutes jotting down a wide variety of character silhouettes and then I start experimenting with what I resulted with. (Please note; the above image only shows a fraction of the quantity of silhouettes I usually draw).

Experimentation:

At first, I envisioned this character to be of a doll archetype, where a medieval jester would reflect the personality and the character’s traits rather well. With this idea, the character was thought to represent a figure of a human. Design inspirations came from music legends, i.e. Beethoven, which is shown within the hairstyle design (slideshow image 2). Other inspirations came from different music genres, such as hip hop and classical music. After tinkering with this thought with different hairstyles, hat designs, face sketches and a few poses, the design was coming along but I felt it was being too predictable, miscellaneous, and couldn’t be read well.

I then started to look back at my inspirations and looked into anthropomorphic character designs more to portray my highly animated over-confident character:

Because the game envisioned for this character is a 3D Platformer, I researched into springy and fast animals; an animal that can move swiftly. I then saw a weasel and the idea stuck with me. Following from this, as shown above, I started roughly sketching some character iterations (after looking back at my silhouette references).

I started with sketching a standard weasel head (slideshow image 1) and gradually exaggerated its proportions; around heads, oblong heads, triangular heads, round ears, square ears, big noses, small noses, and so on. (slideshow image 2) I wanted the character to have a slender body alongside a wide head and big hands; like a 90s cartoon character). I explored this idea quite extensively (slideshow image 3) until I found an iconic design. After while, my ideas expanded, giving this character a spring body , wild short hair, a paintbrush tail and a large belt with a music note encrusted into it. The character started to develop into a “cool” persona that could be seen as “cocky”. This design idea stuck with me (slideshow image 4). I expanded on the design, where the elements of the different music genres stayed and the “serious-but-goofy” idea came to life in this character. (slideshow image 5).

Evolving the idea:

Following on from that final iteration, I developed it further by adding tone and color. Upon finishing this rough concept piece, I gave him the name “Pop the Weasel” to build a sensical connection between the character and the music theme of the game (the name being derived from the nursery rhyme: Pop Goes the Weasel). This design was okay to me, but this character was far from done; further exploration was needed as I was not happy with the design yet.

I felt the problem with the design was the face; the previous colored version of the character seemed a bit unappealing and I focused on finding a friendlier face with a unique expression (slideshow img 1). This lead to the character having a more exaggerated expression, appearing similar to the art style of Crash Bandicoot (slideshow img 2). In slideshow img 3, you can see a big difference in the design direction. I tried a different color scheme as a placeholder while I flesh out the character to match the personality I had imagined.

After mentally revising this character thoroughly through my previous iterations, I felt the character still isn’t capturing my vision and appeared uninteresting.

Then, something began to click. I went into an adventurous mindset and made the hair bigger, wavier and fuzzier, drew a gentler smile, increased the length of its limbs and positioned the character in a more confident stance with the chest pushed out more and the arms and legs apart – with one being pressed against its hip (FIG 3). I also tried designing this character without the hula skirt this time, but it didn’t look right. As I sketched this idea out, the character started to look unintentionally female. The thought of the protagonist being a more tomboy type of character appealed to me since it does blend with the original planned personality well. From here, I started experimenting with color and poses.

Because my character’s personality is suggesting “warmth“, “intelligence”, and “energy”, I fixated on the colors; red, brown, yellow, orange, white and a little bit of black. Which, all go under these traits within color theory. Color placement is very important to me as well (not just what could look alright). I colored her hair red to signify her passionate mindset for music (what she thinks about most of the time). Her yellow skirt and orange spring body signifies her energy and positive attitude. Her brown fur confirms she is “warm” and “reliable“. Her white shoes confirms her pure life direction (she always walks down the correct path). Her green eyes signify “safety“: When someone is unsure about her, they can see in her eyes that she can be relied on. Lastly, her black jacket, glove and hairband: Where most of her color scheme reflects energy, purity, and an overall good personality, the black is an indication that she isn’t perfect, that she can easily fall into temptations as others can; adding a nice balance to the character.

Now that I have established the character’s appearance, it was time to bring out her character more through facial expressions. In the above picture, there are 7 of my favorite ideas that I came up with, the kind of faces I could see this character making through her journey in the game. To present these facial ideas, I drew them within a character concept sheet layout.

In ascending order from the top left: happy, disgust, annoyed, guilty, shocked, in thought, and angry.

Adding to these facial expressions, I chose 3 of my favorite poses I had drawn during my design process and placed them within a character concept sheet layout.

In order of sequence from the left: at the top of her spring jump, feeling excited, and feeling anxious about something going wrong in her orchestra.

From here, I decided this is how the character is going to look and behave. From this point onwards, the character’s name was changed from “Pop the Weasel” to “Poppi the Weasel”.

I decided to redraw the turn-around sheet (above) because I thought the tail did not benefit the design of the character.

Final Concept:

The final stage in this character design project was to create a fully fleshed out concept sheet, bringing my vision to full life. For this, I used photoshop with its advanced toolset. This was the result:

You will notice that I had designed the shoes as slick slip-on trainers (visually representing her speedy movement). You can also see I changed the hair band color to a light gray (to ease the black energy from the design). Other significant changes are the eyes and tail. I have given her eyelashes to make her feminine character more obvious, and I erased the tail altogether. This change was made because I felt that it was an unnecessary inclusion (in regards to her move set) and disrupted the character’s design flow. In addition, it is also a visual confirmation that she isn’t a natural animal, but an imitation of one.

This has been quite an adventure to design this character: starting from rough black shapes, humans to animals, males to females whilst tinkering with facial structures and poses. All in all, this has been an incredibly fun experience. As people say, “A designers job is never done”. With that said, this character will most likely develop even further as time progresses. For character designers like myself, seeing the final illustration is the goal and a great accomplishment, but the journey is where the fun begins.