Like Kitty I started the design process during the beginning stages of the project. As this is a very personal project to me I thought how can I express the character feeling low and not really wanting to do much on her day off? I decided to give her a messy bun, something she would have quickly done just to keep the hair off her face, as the start of the story her mental health is quite bad she wouldn't want to make much of an effort in anything.
Here are some reference imagery I had for potential design aspects and/or textures (I do not own these images).
For the original design I originally had her in very basic baggy clothing however, as the part of the story I'm creating for is the morning I didn't think having everyday clothes would make sense to the visual telling of the story. I decided to still keep the clothing baggy however she is now going to be wearing pyjamas throughout. The pyjamas are grey with black stars all over. I originally added the stars to express visually via colour how her mental health is becoming more bearable and her adorable interaction with Kitty, the stars would start to change to yellow. I didn't think this was great for the storytelling as I feel this would cause too much to happen at once as the environment itself is changing colour, it wasn't needed.
When it comes to the colour changing, I wanted to explore this with the skin colour of the young woman to help better portray how she's feeling at the time. For example, when she is feeling really low her complexing is quite dull and pale but when she interacts with Kitty, her complexion brightens and becomes more 'healthy'.
As everything is very stylised within the piece I thought it would be best to have an 'abnormal' colour for the hair, instead of having it natural I decided to give the hair a purple colour. I think this could really help showing her pale complexion at the start then fitting nicely with the more vibrant appearance later on within the short film.
I am very happy with the character changes
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