Mortal Engines: Self Character Design

For this project, we had to create a character based off of ourselves and the ‘Mortal Engines’ book. The first thing I did was spend a few days reading the book. I found the book to start off rather slow, but very soon I found myself getting sucked into the lore of the book.

I based my character off of someone who was part of the ‘Historian Guild’ as an archaeologist. I didn’t want to give my character any highly advanced or good quality equipment because in this world, everyone is scavenging off of other cities as resources are becoming very scarce.

Based from the descriptive words I’ve read up, I created some greyscale designs. After the first design which was based off of the basic historian, I ended up making the character look more like an adventurer or an agent; which swayed my decision into making an archaeologist rather than a low grade historian.

In some designs I included some random parts of armour seen in museums. I added this because towards the end of the book, the historians rise up with anything they could get to fight off a rival guild using anything they could grab from their museums.

I chose the third design as my main design because I really liked how simple and convenient his clothes were, which also suited his gritty scavenging background.

After choosing my base design, I followed up with a palette test to see which colours I would like to use on my character. I chose the green and beige colour.

When finalising my character designs, I added on a red sash around his waist to compliment his green shirt, a light sword for defence and to illuminate dark areas, a glove with a light to also illuminate any dark areas, a rusty but usable cross bow, a small hip bag, and a grandfather clock attached to him like a bag. Influenced by one of my favourite people from the industry, Daisuke Ishiwatari, I chose a grandfather clock because I wanted to have something unusual on my character that could also be practical.

The idea of the grandfather clock is that it carries his ‘old tech’ that he discovers. I feel that the clock could add some interest to his background story (and in a lot of my designs I like to create stories for my characters to keep my creativity flowing).

I chose to put my character in a place that existed within the ‘Mortal Engines’ book; so the scene I chose was the ‘Shan Guo’ mountain range. I wanted to create a scene with a large scale look to it so I made my character overlook a gorge of mist and mountain.

In the Shan Guo mountain range, looking in the distance at a large group holding torches.

I thought that this scene didn’t particularly focus on my character so I created another one which put my character in a dark cave like area. This was to show the uses of his lights as well as see his face a little more.

Exploring the dark depths.