Amanita Gremlin

[amanitagremlin]

Character Spotlight: Amanita Edition

I’ve been scrolling through Tumblr and have seen artists post their original characters (OCs), but they don’t write much about them.  So here is something I’m going to try and do every week; I call it Character Spotlight, and every week I'm going to blog about one of my many OCs and write a bit about my OC and my process when it comes to creating their design. So I figured the best character to start this off with would be Amanita.

About Amanita

Amanita is one of the three main characters of a show called the Graveyard Garden. Amanita is a shy and reserved girl who is forced to move to a new city and school after a loved one passes away. As she struggles to adapt to the sudden changes, she finds these glasses that allow her to see and interact with the ghosts that surround her new home.

Age: 15 Gender: Female Ethnicity: Mexican American Hobbies:   Hand Sewing and Embroidery: Her grandma would always fix her clothes since Amanita would always come back from school with tattered clothes. She eventually taught her when she turned 10, and it became one of the many ways they bonded.   Trinket Collecting: She loves collecting little trinkets like rusted keys, unique-looking buttons, beads, charms, pins, tiny bottles, leaves, rocks, and mushrooms(when it’s safe to pick up)    Strolling: She likes walking through more forestry areas, as when she feels overwhelmed, the change of scenery helps her relax and de-stress. Personality: While she is shy, awkward, and reserved, that shyness hides how empathetic, observant, creative, and lively she can be. Friends: Lavender (a witch) and Aster(a ghost)

My thought process when creating Amanita

In the beginning, the main character of the Graveyard Garden was a little girl with pink hair named Poppy. She didn't have much of a personality at first; when I originally made her, she was just a sketch design I couldn't get out of my head.

Then, when I integrated her into a Character Selection Project I had made for class, I chose to give her a very calm personality, as she was supposed to be a character that a player could interact with the world, like the character Frisk from Undertale. During this project, I realized that her pink hair was clashing a lot with her yellow cardigan and other pastel-colored accessories, so I toned down her color palette by giving her brown hair.

In her newest design, I changed a lot about Poppy's character, like her name, age, personality, outfit, and color palette, mainly because the medium that I had in mind for this project had changed, so instead of the story being depicted in a game, it would be depicted in a show or film. ( one of my teachers would say that my character was slowly growing up throughout my other projects.) The most recent change in her design was her color pallet since I felt that her pallet was very simple and flat.

Thank You for Reading!!! I would lover to here about your OCs!!! (^-^) <3

[amanitagremlin]

Character Compass: 5 Rules for Character Design

What Makes a Great Character Design? Is it their color palette? Is it their outfit? I love creating and designing my own characters, but sometimes I struggle to make a character's design make sense. So whenever I struggle with a design, I like to use these five questions to create a character design. These questions should cover the 5 rules of Character Design: recognizable silhouette, purposeful Shape Language, deliberate color palette, storytelling and flaws, and lastly, exaggeration.

For this example, we’ll use one of my characters. Her name is Amanita Ortiz, from a small project I like to call the Graveyard Garden.

1. Is Your Character’s Silhouette Recognizable?

The mark of a good character design is that you can immediately recognize them just by their silhouette, stripping them of their color and interior design. To make them easily recognizable, I recommend using asymmetry and distinctive shapes to set your characters apart from one another.

In my character's case, her head shape is what makes her visually recognizable compared to some of my other characters' designs.

2. Does Your Character Have Purposeful Shape Language?

Shapes help communicate subconscious character traits about your characters even before your audience gets to know them. For example, Circles suggest that a character may be warm, approachable, and harmless. A Square may convey strength, stability, and reliability. Or a Triangle indicates cunning, aggression, or dynamic energy.

In my character, there are many heart shapes; these hearts may subconsciously communicate to my audience that the character is affectionate, vulnerable, and empathetic.

3. Is the Character’s Color Palette Deliberate?

Just like with shapes, colors subconsciously tell your audience a bit about your character. Red may symbolize love, passion, anger, and danger. Blue indicates trust, loyalty, responsibility, sadness, and conservatism. Yellow conveys joy, positivity, fear, and deception. These colors have a multitude of meanings, and I find it incredibly interesting how they are used in character design and in predicting what someone's character is like.

In Amanita’s color palette, she uses very warm colors like red and brown to symbolize a couple of things. The Browns in her palette symbolize comfort, honesty, support, and wisdom in our view, but in her own view, she sees herself as dull, boring, and timid. The red in her shoes and glasses symbolizes her passion and love for the world around her, but there's deliberately little red so she doesn't draw attention from her peers.

4. What Story Does Your Character's Design Tell?

A virtually interesting design must tell us something about a character. Clothing, props, and posture help to reflect a character's background, occupation, and world. Flaws like scars, mismatched accessories, or awkward posters help make characters feel relatable.

Amanita's design features a multitude of items that reveal a lot about her, such as her glasses, cardigan, tucked-in shirt, red Converse, braids, and freckles. The cardigan and tucked-in shirt show how she prefers wearing soft, cozy, and casual clothes. The braids and freckles show her creativity and uniqueness (her freckles are how she got her name). Her red glasses and Converse continue to show her creativity. The thing I would change about this version of her design is to add a small mushroom on her cardigan to show not only her love for mushrooms but also her skill in embroidery and sewing.

5. What Should You Exaggerate In Your Design?

A great character design exaggerates human or animal features to emphasize a specific emotion, trait, or role. And by simplifying or distorting normal proportions, you can help your audience read and empathize with your characters.

For Amanita, I chose to keep her face simplified, as I liked artists who used this style, which made animating her expressions fun and easy to draw.

If you're trying to make your design look more professional for a portfolio, I would recommend creating a character sheet. On your character sheet, you should have your character in different angles, specifically either the front, back, or side profiles. Optionally, you can add written details or facts about your character on the side of your character sheet, or you can add different facial expressions.

While you don’t necessarily need to follow these rules and may even find ways to break them, I find them very useful tools for creating or improving a character's design. What do you think about these rules? Think they could be improved upon? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. I would also love to hear about your own characters.

Thank You For Reading!!! (^-^)<3

[amanitagremlin]

Permission Granted to Be Weird

So, we've all made art we're not proud of when we were younger, right? Like really bad pieces that you hide away for years, until you find them again and finally look them over—but never show anyone… Yeah, me too. (-_-;) But what if I told you that making cringe-worthy art is actually a good thing? Would you believe it?

Reasons Why Making Cringe Art Is Valuable

1. IT'S A SIGN OF GROWTH For many of us, when we first start drawing, our work isn’t great—maybe a limb is too big, the eyes don’t match, or we aren’t considering perspective, or the colors clash because they’re too vibrant. That can be frustrating, especially for beginners. And that’s totally normal. Most artists don’t start out creating masterpieces. Drawing is a skill that improves with practice, learning from watching others, noticing what needs fixing, and growing through mistakes.

2. IT ENCOURAGES EXPERIMENTATION Making cringe art promotes trying new things without the fear of creating something ugly or awkward. There’s no punishment for messing up or creating something weird.

3. IT PUSHES BACK AGAINST SOCIAL NORMS

When we’re young, we often don’t care what others think—what’s “cool” is what we believe at the moment. Later, we might criticize those early drawings because we conform to what others see as “cringey” or embarrassing. But that old art is from a time when you were unapologetically passionate.

4. IT SHOWS YOUR AUTHENTIC SELF We’re in a time when we have AI and popular trends taking over creative spaces, I'd say making cringe art is pretty valuable. While AI can make some pretty cringe-worthy content, it is still pretty soulless compared to making your own cringe art that feels more uniquely personal. Popular trends conform far too much to what's socially popular or cool and don’t give much room for authenticity. Your cringe art shows your unfiltered, authentic self-expression, and that makes it valuable.

5. IT FOCUSES ON JOY OVER PERFECTION

Finally, the main reason why I believe cringe art is valuable because it prioritizes joy over perfection. Many aspiring artists hesitate because they fear their art won't be perfect. That fear of judgment and the need for perfection can paralyze us from growing, experimenting, expressing ourselves, and truly just enjoying the process of making art. 

I often find myself struggling to make each design or piece perfect. Even now, I am trying not to be in my head when it comes to writing this blog. Especially since I am also posting a lot of my old art that I have not shown to many people. But regardless, I will try to enjoy making my flawed art

Thank You for Reading!!! (^-^) <3

[amanitagremlin]

Welcome To My Corner Of The Internet!!!

Hello, and welcome to my account. You can call me Amanita! I am a Digital Artist who does Character Designs, Background Art, Storyboarding, Animation, 3D Modeling, and a little bit of graphic design. On my page, I will post about what I have learned from 5 years of taking graphic art classes and my process for creating some of my designs.

The Process Of Making My Digital Avatar

When I made this, it was for a portfolio assignment, and we were tasked with making Avatars of ourselves. I didn’t like my first attempt at making my avatar, as at the time, I felt rushed to make something to avoid losing points on the assignment quickly, so I made a quick and simple sketch of myself on paper in whatever I was wearing at the time and added random little growing leaves to make it look more interesting. But looking back at the drawing now, I see how noticeable it was that I was rushing, as the line art looks messier than my next attempt.

In my second attempt at making my Avatar, I had a little more fun sketching this little gremlin, as at the time I was procrastinating on an assignment for another class and felt the urge to draw something. I want to think that my Avatar is the little gremlin in my head that tells me to act on my impulses and give in to my urges to create art, even though I may have assignments.

How does this Avatar Represent Me

As I mentioned, my Avatar is basically a gremlin version of me that acts on its creative impulses. As my avatar, she should reflect what I like. The mushroom hat represents my immense love for mushrooms, both aesthetically and in my collection of mushroom jewelry and room decor. The olive green cardigan and brown boots are very cozy and comfortable outfit pieces and colors that I associate with autumn, which is the season I find myself to be the most creative, and it is also the season I was born in. The pencil my character holds represents my preference for sketching over painting. Lastly, the pointed ears on the character represent fairy pointed ears, as many friends say I have a very fairy aesthetic and constantly quote “She was a fairy”.

#CapCut #foryourpage #art #digitalart #amanitamuscaria🍄

Thank You for Reading!!! (^-^) <3