Character Development: Bridging Digital and Traditional Drawing Techniques
Authors: Moga Maria , Radu Moga Dan 
Published: January 2024

Digital painting has some particularities that distinguish it from traditional drawing. These can have an influence on the ways, the stages a visual artist goes through to develop and stabilize a character. These features allow for a clearer ordering of the relationship between structure and function in character design, with a positive influence on the clarity and coherence of visual information.The working hypothesis of this study proposes a better use of digital applications in relation to the representation and structured development of the character. Digital applications allow the inclusion from early stages of synthetic shapes for the interior components that will ultimately determine and characterize the character. Elements of applied, artistic anatomy can find their place and role much more clearly using digital applications. Characters developed in this way will have a greater efficiency of graphic representation and expressiveness of the message.Thus, a system is created between the student and the graphics tablet. In this system, the student's creativity represents the input introduced in the digital subcomponent. The output is the character development stages digitally reproduced and understood.The verification of the hypothesis considered the characteristics of the complex system developed between the artist and the digital medium of representation. Summing them up they are:• much easier way to work at scale,• the depth of the drawing or the details can be much more easily modified according to the needs of the construction drawing,• the equivalence between the projective content of the student and the detailed content of the created character is achieved much more easily,• overlap of the planes and implicitly the internal and external anatomical structure• for fantastic and imaginary characters, truthfulness is replaced by an anatomical logic of the relationship between the external form and the internal structureAn assignment was administered to two groups of students. The first group of students chose to develop the theme using the traditional methods of concept drawing. Group two used the graphics tablet and digital applications. The proposed theme was the development of a character for which the relationship between skeletal volumes and body shapes should be highlighted, the mobility in the joints should be clear and the connection between the shape of the cranial volume and the expression of the physiognomy.The concepts obtained by the students in the development of the theme were compared using criteria, the most important of which are: the stability of the concept, the logic and coherence in the complementarity of the anatomical forms, the legibility of the drawing and the details, the degree of complexity of the character, the ability of the character to wear a message and to be expressive.The results confirmed the hypothesis and showed that the digital construction drawing is more advantageous. The constructive method in drawing using the digital support contributes to the realization of the character.In conclusion, in the search and identification phase of the concept, the observation drawing is not useful as it only describes and does not explain. The constructive drawing as a result of the student-digital environment interaction, is the one that proposes the character in all the explicit complexity of the connection between the internal anatomical structure and the external conformation.