Mazed Characters

© Quentin Blake

As I posted earlier, our main inspiration for the characters for the project Mazed was the illustrator for Roald Dahls children books, Quentin Blake. I really like his style, the sketchy and loose pencil that suits perfectly for children, but adults as well, because it's quite realistic at the same time. 

I thought this would be perfect for Piskey Led since this is animation is going to be on a tourist app for Cornwall, the audience would be both children and adults. The only thing with this style that would be a problem is that it's too sketchy, and would look a bit messy in an animation. We needed cleaner lines to make it work with the timespan we had to animate. 

This is how William and John ended up as. I tried to keep them simple, with organic shapes. Beside Quentin Blake as inspiration we googled ‘Bristish farmer’ to find the stereotypical farmer look. We wanted them to be typical farmers, as well as typical British. As I'm 'foreign' here in England, I know how the stereotypical British person for us 'foreigner' look like, and one of the most typical things is red hair. That's why they both got red hair, as well as it has the movie a wider colour pallet. We chose to make them the common comical duo; one short overweight one and the other tall and skinny.