Game design:

Working with silhouettes:

While making the character concept art more often we ignores the very basic principles for character designing called silhouette. Silhouette is an single coloured image of an person painted in black or some other solid color. So why we use silhouette in concept design? Well to start with the basic idea, silhouette helps in the determining the posture of the character along with some of the basic features of the body expressions. These body expression could be of anything like, fear, Happiness, tryumph, sadness etc. To show the emotions overall, we study the body language of people during different mood and behaviour, also the body buildup and the attitude is necessary to notice. So after you have full grip over the observed info regarding the character, try to draw the character in just one color so that you could get a feel of the overall body feature. You could apply the same principle after the character has been made or in the middle of the process. I will discuss in detail regarding the silhouette but for now please have a look in the below image for an example:

As you seen above, the Images tells the story,like the image with black colored character is showing the emotion of his through body language, and in the later it has been concluded that the character got shocked due to sudden realization. If you could study the earlier image of black painted character you could get a hint of his attitude regarding the behaviour, now in the second image you could see the overall feeling it is bursting. Have a look on another image below:

So silhouetting principle helps in creating the concept character and concept background for manual as well as digital paintings. I hope enjoyed the article while reading it. If you have any query or dicussions to make please feel free to leave your comments, thank you.