Developer Diaries: One Day in London #3

In the third issue of the development diaries, the OWL-studio team shares how they worked on emotions for the characters in One Day in London.

For a novel made in realistic graphics, emotions for the characters are a whole story. In this regard, it is easier for cartoonists – linear drawing is more tolerant of changes… Here, every emotion has to be drawn with all the chiaroscuro and other joys of a realistic drawing.

In one of the projects similar to ours, the developers used “animation for the poor”: the character’s head was shaking on his neck, his eyes were blinking and there were two states of the mouth that imitated the movement of the lips in conversation. Sometimes a mouth-smile or a mouth-insult was added.

We rejected this approach right away: a character animated in this way looks like a doll. Better – no animation at all than the one that emphasizes its unreality. As they say, the devil is in the details, and we paid attention to a huge number of little things that allow the viewer to believe in the picture.

Try to just smile while looking in the mirror. You will change the oval of the face, the shape of the cheeks, the cut of the eyes, the position of the wings of the nose. Some even have their ears moving. Moreover, each emotion has its own pose: if a person is angry, he raises his shoulders, if he laughs, he throws his head back a little. Therefore, for the characters of the novel, we often redraw not only the face, but also the whole pose for each new emotion.

By the way, Harry Fisher, one of the main characters, wears a brown suit. Having drawn 5 poses for him, the artist Olga Prozorova said that she now knows everything about brown and its shades.

The most difficult thing in this process is to make all variations of the same mascot similar to each other, to observe the similarity of the hero. It is especially difficult to do this if two artists draw one character.

Harry’s Mascots series. Which one of them was painted by another artist?
Having had enough with Harry, we are now trying to avoid this, and if you need to quickly make a line of emotions of one character, we divide between artists not by characters, but by the drawing area: one draws costumes for everyone, the other draws faces for everyone.