Nine, the .Gif, by Jessica

Remember Jessica? She’s the Accelerate game designer and artist (the two often go hand in hand) who created her own emojis. Together with Game-U instructor Matthew, she crafted a custom .gif! Check out her work.

Jessica’s been working on drawing more expressive figures for her games. Artists (and game designers) love inspiration, so Matthew encouraged Jessica to use her favorite character, Nine (from the 2009 computer animated film 9), as her inspiration. During class, Jessica carefully drew a few facial expressions for the 3D model of Nine that Matthew created in advance. It took some time, but Jessica came up with the expressions she wanted! Together, she and Matthew applied the expressions to the 3D model and animated it. Nine goes from pensive, to angry, to frightened (notice the beads of sweat!) in just a few seconds! Jessica made good use of simple lines to emphasize and de-emphasize key features of Nine’s face, creating powerful, distinct effects on the viewer’s perception. Note the dashes around Nine’s eyes when he’s pensive, or the little curl of his lip that lends his pensiveness an irritated context. As Jessica clearly knows, those fine details are everything when it comes to capturing emotion!

Thanks for sharing your work with us, Jessica. You’re definitely getting the hang of drawing expressive faces. Since Matthew tells us you’re looking to master sprite design now, with an eye on an RPG Maker game about foxes, we look forward to even more awesome work in the weeks to come!