Abandon hope all ye who enter here

The week so far has been rough with 40% on my time spent still working on a concept and the remaining 60% screaming into a pillow about my concepts. I've over thought everything to the point of feeling completely lost in it all. I don't seem to be the only thing getting a little lost, dichotomy itself seems to have gone on a journey through Chinese whispers about how different the characters actually have to be and there seems to be a huge focus on scale (no pun intended), leaving me fairly certain once again about my design as sitting in a room full of people who say it's not different enough tends to do.

After returning to the shapes again I instantly hit the same unyielding brick wall of seeming not to move forward. The ideas just weren't coming and by midday Tuesday there wasn't anytime to dwell on it any longer. I hadn't walked away with a lot of ideas for the shapes so with my minimal options I went with what I thought was the strongest one being, chess. A lot of the shapes reminded me of various chess pieces and by this point I needed something to go with.

Face Off dichotomy

Having been showed an episode of a special effects show called 'Face Off' by one of the tutors in the Wednesday lecture, where contestants had to design a pair of characters that were basically, good and evil but clearly belonged together, I took from it my idea would work well as a dichotomy to have these same pieces that must play for different sides. I designed a few different pieces, mostly the Bishop and the Knight and decided the Bishop had the most potential to work with in terms of shape and design.
This also fit well into my time frame. I'd lost a huge amount of time struggling with the concepting stage and now had a small window for modelling. I wanted to make both characters, it seemed redundant to me to design a character whose purpose is to be in a pair and to only have the one in the end. The overall similarities of the designs mean I can carry the first model over and make alterations instead of making a whole new model from scratch.

I moved through the rest of the work fairly quickly and didn't get to explore as much as I could with the costumes. My main focus was trying to make sure the tonal values from the first character was inverted for the second to create that link between them with the colour palettes. 

My final colour choice was purple and yellow. Since nearly everyone when asked selected the purple for the black bishop I wanted to use the contrasting colour for the white. With the orthographic images complete I can finally move onto the modelling which after all this trouble with 2D will be a much welcome break..