Finn Week 8 and 9: The Prince

As the Prince was the protagonist from the story we felt it would be important to spend a second week on designing him. This would allow us to produce the two versions of him in the story. The first, is when he lives in the safety of the castle and the second is after Iron John has taken him into the forest.
We set up our Pinterest board and gathered as much reference as we possibly could.
I felt he had to be opposite to the King in his stance and general design. The King has almost a downward feeling. His horns curve downwards, he has a weight on his shoulders, he is slightly hunched over, his facial expression is somewhat negative and a majority of what he wears has downward vertical lines. I tried to give the impression that he is closed off from the world around him.
For the Prince, I tried to reverse this. His horns should curve upwards and his posture should have more of a curve to it.

Royalty is a big part of the story so I thought the use of crowns and intricate head pieces would be a good way of having some consistency in my designs. For the Prince, I wanted it to develop as he does throughout the story.


One big challenge for me I realised as soon as I started this task was that drawing children is extremely hard to do! Their facial proportions are quite different from that of an adults. This proved to be a great learning experience. Below are some sketches as well as some head studies where I played with hair styles.

With a general idea of what I had in mind I got to work on some clothing iterations. I tried looking at what makes an iconic video game character. Link from the Legend of Zelda and Ico from Shaow of the Colossus stood out to me the most. Their design is simple and their silouhettes are instantly recognizable. I figured to much noise would kill my design. Elements of the King had to show as well such as fur, clothing colour and the crown.

After establishing the young Prince I tried pushing the silhouette for the older Prince. I wanted him to have a wild appearance after living with iron John in the forest for some time.
Parts of Iron John had to reflect in the second phase of the Prince's character development as well. I used things like colour, tribal elements and his staff to show the influence of what living with Iron John has on the Prince. In the story the prince's hair falls into a magic pool and turns his hair gold so I had to make sure this reflected in the design. After some silhouettes I could see they were becoming a bit too noisy and I would have to simplify them down.

 The progression of the Prince's head piece was going to be very important as well.

The big challenge for me here was upgrading the Prince's armour appearance with out adding too much detail. I also tried to add upward curving motif's in the character such as his crown, curved horns and his curved weapon.

During this 2 week period I also completed my second pass on the Huntsman. I made sure elements of my early sketches made it into the design. The big thing here was to make the design fit more within the world I had envisioned compared to my previous attempt. I like to think I've achieved this.