Cup of Coffee - character design

For the Cup of Coffee brief I've designed one unhappy character (above) and one happy character (below).

The unhappy character will eventually drink a good cup of coffee that alters his mood to become happy and vice versa with the happy character.

I wanted to achieve a simplistic character design whilst also giving them distinct characteristics in their appearance. The male character has a rather quirky face shape that I developed from just a simple lowercase 'b'. For the female character I added a round afro which I will hopefully be able to use to exaggerate some of her movements.

I want to have a walk for both the characters to relate to their individual moods. For this, I sketched each of the key frames in their walk cycles. I referred back to some of my previous studies where I used some of Richard Williams' techniques to help me determine weight and tempo for each character. For the male character I want his walk to be hunched and heavy to help emphasise his bad mood. Therefore, the accent in his walk would need to be down rather than up. For the female character I want her walk to be more lifted and bouncy to play into her joyful mood, meaning her accent would be up. Getting the walks how I want them will take some practice however I feel the sketches I've done will make the process somewhat faster.