In the first year of college we were given a challenge where we chose two words at random and then had to create a character from them. My two words were ‘stationary’ and ‘zombie’.

I started off by sketching a few ideas of zombies with typical stationary incorporated into their designs.

Very early on I had decided that I wanted the zombie character to have rings going down their spine like a ring-bound notebook or a binder folder so all three sketches include that. I also knew that I wanted to try and include different pieces of stationary to the final character’s design and in the end I went forward with the design at the top.

Once I had the character figured out, I drew her three times on a sheet of A3 paper, one forward facing, a second facing to the side and a final one from the rear.

I then lined the drawings and erased the sketch underneath and scanned in to open in Photoshop.

I opened the scanned in turnaround sheet into Photoshop and altered the contrast levels until the line art was dark enough that I could use the Magic Wand tool to select individual parts of the character. A setback that I faced at this stage was that, despite there being no gaps in the line-art and the lines being defined enough for the wand tool, when trying to use it, it would still select large portions of, if not the whole image, instead of just the areas I tried to select. Instead I had to use the Lasso and Polygon Selection tools to go around the areas I need to colour in and shade.

I then coloured in the character and created separate layers for shading and highlights to make sure I had control of how they blended. 

Something I hadn’t noticed at the time, but have noticed as I’ve been writing this, is that in the initial sketch of this character I had labelled the shirt underneath her overalls as being a similar or same pink as that on a typical pencil. However, in the final version, I gave her a more off white colour. 

While I like her design, I think her clothes could have been more muted in colour as well as more tattered and dirty in order to further reflect that she is undead. I also think in someways, she may have benefitted more if her shirt was more of a muted pink instead of off-white as it feels to me that it washes her out a bit more than I’d like.

Overall, I was quite happy with this project as it challenged me to create a character out of things I usually wouldn’t have done and it tested my ability to draw full bodies at the time.