Cleaners
About: Another project to practice game art, yet this time with a specialization: character concept art. I decided to work on this project, as I wanted to practice more human character design. Which is why I came up with a concept for a game, backstories for the characters and set off to making some character designs.
Date: 2025 January (2 weeks)
Character design
The goal was to make a character lineup with 3 clearly unique and expressive characters, with intentional designs that would express their personalities and backstories. I also made sure that they had visual aspects that unified them, portraying that they are a team, which became the bright yellow hazmat suits and cleaning equipment.
Moodboards:
I first came up with the concept for what type of game it would be as well as the game world and then made moodboards for each character, writing down key facts about them and finding design elements that could represent them. I also chose different cleaning supplies for each character, that would also work as a weapon.
Lumberjack:
The Lumberjack was the character I had the clearest vision for. The idea was to make a character that radiates a sense of strength and, depending on whether you're fighting with or against him: safety or intimidation. He's a character that used to hide his kindness and deep care under a criminal facade. However, after meeting the Kid and the Mage characters , some details start to appear in his design, hinting towards him starting to accept his own nature. Below I attached an Image with some explanation of the intent behind different elements of his design.
Mage
Lumberjack
Kid:
The biggest challenges for the kid character turned out to be drawing the face, as I had not had that much experience drawing semi-realistic childish face structures. However, using more references and combining different facial features produced a satisfactory result. The Mech was something a bit more foreign for me as well, yet I kept it fairly simple as my main goal with this project was human character design. Below I attached an image with some explanations of the intent behind the different elements of his design.
K i d
Mech
Mage:
The Mage character was the most difficult to design. The personality I created for her had a lot of different and even clashing elements that were complicated to balance: Hints of prestige from her upbringing, something to represent her rebellious personality, elements of her love for nature together with the cleaner supplies and uniform. Which is why it turned out that I combined the most silhouette iterations to achieve the final design. Below I attached an image with some explanations of the intent behind the different elements of her design.
Mage
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