Mascot Character Design Branding
Mascot Character Design & Development, Pencil Sketching, Inking, Digitization
The Real Mob RPG
Location
London, UK
Services Rendered
- Mascot Character Design & Development
- Pencil Sketching
- Inking
- Digitization
Deliverables
- Final Source Files
- Brand Style Guide
The Real Mob is a world renowned RPG that allows players to emulate the life style of the Mafia era with an online playing environment.
Players move through rounds of different challenges progressing through the RPG. With over 150,000 members, TRM is a leading RPG platform in it’s genre.
Project Outcome
Brand Strategy
TRM came to SpellBrand to help them create a set of mascot characters that would brand their platform with a unique visual language. The characters would represent the various roles that players can choose to enter that world. The characters had to be classic and still have a modern look and feel about them.
Having worked on dozens of mascot character design Branding projects in the past, the SpellBrand team immediately went into an “immersion” mode that is the starting point of all character design projects that we undertake. During this phase, we research the context of the character to learn as much as possible about the character and how it interacts with its world view.
We researched the history of Mafia starting from the prohibition in the 1920s all the way up to the current incarnations. We gathered hundreds of reference photos of real life characters from the early periods to under their clothing, accessories and look and feel.
Brand Solution
We then started sketching the characters on paper with a pencil. Mascot characters that are sketched in pencil always tend to come out better compared to the characters that are created directly on the computer. This could be because the sketching process helps refine and fine-tune the subtle characteristics of the characters and give them a more natural look while still retaining their “cartoon” like base.We ended up with dozens of pencil sketches for the 10 different characters. Working with the client, we fine-tuned each sketch to arrive at the final mascot character design branding which was then rendered in ink and then digitized on the computer by scanning the sketches and converting them into vector shapes.
The final step was the coloring phase which involved applying colors in layers starting with the base colors and then ending with accentuated effects and shadows for depth.