Costume and Silhouettes

Costume design is extremely important as it essential part of character design hinting at story and personality. It is an extension of an individual and their persona and can quickly communicate details such as age, sex and origin along with many other defining attributes of the character. 


There was a great  book about costume in relation to body form and poses called Character Costume Figure Drawing: Step-by-step Drawing Methods for Theatre Costume.

This book was a interesting read that has a detailed section on proportion and weighting of the body which I found really useful as my anatomy is not really up to scratch.  There are wonderful drawings and diagrams that help put everything into perspective along with techniques and approaches to drawing a figure including stationery and action poses.

There was another very useful book I came across called The Skillful Huntsman by Scott Robertson that one of my peers introduced me to. This book goes through the character design process with a focus on different approaches, namely silhouettes.

Silhouettes are very important when designing a character. It's useful for concept art to get a rough idea of shapes and poses as well as communicating story and personality. Even from silhouettes, you can get an idea of the clothing of the character which, excluding the weapons and equipment make up the majority of the silhouette again showing the importance of costume. Here is one of the pages with the artists approach to the designs.