Hello! I love your humanformer designs- is there a process that you have toward making these designs? Where do you mainly get the outfit inspiration from?
Hi I’m so happy you like my designs! I’m not sure how I can explain my process behind designing humanized Transformers characters in a cohesive way and make it easy to understand, but I’ll try! First and foremost I always analyze the character, I’ll use Windblade as the first example. Windblade is one of the easiest character to turn into a Human because It’s already established that her design is inspired by Japanese Onna-bugeisha so it’s easy to have something to work with. But I still observe the original design and brainstorm how those mechanical elements of the character could translate into a recognizable design because my goal with human Transformers designs is to *instantly* make them recognizable, even as humans. This kind of observation in character designs in order to dissect what elements make it stand out and more iconic is defintely a skill but one you can hone easily and get the hang of with practice. I really recommend BaM Animation’s video on good character designs because they explain it really well which you can find here → https://youtu.be/8wm9ti-gzLM My next step is to then gather a lot of reference! Pureref is an amazing programm for reference gathering I highly recommend using it.
What happens next is that I make a first draft, mainly to establish proportions, pose and the silhoutte of the character. It’s good to do that on paper but It’s not a must. Just helps me doodle it without much care. I always try to keep the silhoutte and shapes of the character close to the original to help it stay recognizable.
From there I take a picture with my phone, adjust the brightness and contrast of the image, make it black and white then go over to digital to refine the pose, anatomy and lines. It’s good to start with a blank body first before making a new layer above it and drawing the clothes with a different color. Then I erase the parts of the body who are covered by clothes.
The last step, which is lining and coloring Isn’t pretty eventful. And just like the shapes and silhouettes, when it comes to the color palette I always try to stay true to the original design because colors are extremely important to keep a character design iconic as well.
And that’s pretty much how most of my Humanformers design processes go. Obviously there are variations depending on the nature of each character. What do I do when the character I want to design isn’t inspired by human culture? The same basic principles still apply! Which is to analyze the character, dissect what elements make the design recognizable, gather reference and translate it into a human design. For example, Wing reminded me of Korean hwarang and warriors so I gathered reference and did the same steps that also applied to Windblade.
Note that I don’t completely rely on my references though! Sometimes I just dabble around and have fun with what I’m working with by drawing certain shapes from the cybertronian design as a clothing item that represents it well! Most of the time it’s a mix of both. I sometimes even take Inspiration from other people’s works taking the original cybertronian design in mind, make some drafts, [ Credit: Arnold Tsang, Johannes Helgeson ]
Then basically mix, merge, refine and draw until I’ve got a good result! It’s definitely a process and one I actually enjoy. (Except Human Dai Atlas he was HELL to design lol)
Looking up Images of real people for example a character’s voice actor or taking Inspiration from the already established holoforms is also never wrong!
I really hope that this helps you and that this mini tutorial clears up all the essentials! I highly recommend checking out everything I’ve linked in this post and never by shy to take inspiration from other people’s works! Have fun and stay safe ♥