Saturday 8 March 2014

Sandman character, visual research


To gain more inspiration, I looked into Neil Gaiman's Sandman/Sandman Overture, and other designs of Sandman with in other films.

It was interesting to see the different portrayals of the character, Sandman, for instance in the film Spiderman 3, the sandman is a villain who escapes from prison, whilst he runs from the police he stumbles into a testing facility where his molecules particulate into grains of sand.  He obtains the ability to absorb sand to make himself into a giant or turn into a pile of sand, but he cannot use sand in the same way as the traditional folk tale sandman. 

The Rise of the Guardians Sandman is a friendlier version of the character Sandman, gaining the same powers of sleep as does Gaiman's. The character is depicted in golden colours and sparkles, that emphasises how this sandman is a 'good guy', relating to the young audience that it is aimed for.











Looking at existing character designs of Gaiman's Sandman, we can see that he is always depicted with in the two monochrome colours, white and black, with further development of adding blue and green hues for the illusion like appearance and yellowy tints to signify sand. The portrayal of the Sandman has a dip pen scratchy and ink appearance through the use of the media and the character design. However the design has developed into using desaturated watercolours which make the composition seem faded, misty and far away in the sense of how the edges and ends of the tree roots and character are fade in colour. Another depiction uses a traditional Japanese style through the use of line, structure and shape of the character and objects with the piece.
I found that the latest Sandman comics, Sandman Overture, includes beautiful and well thought out structures to the composition to each page, for each panel is presented in a clever and aesthetically pleasing manner. For instance the first double spread portrays a set of teeth and in each tooth there is a panel, which relates to the main character depicted in the panels, Corinthian, who's eyes are actually mouths.  









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