Charlie Dickson is interested in character design and wants to work for animation studios like Disney or Pixar. He designed an original character named Siouxsie, a gothic lady with a sharp chin representing her wit and soft curves representing her soft side. Charlie shows illustrations of other characters he designed and sketches demonstrating his skills in life drawing, poses, and use of mediums like charcoal. He provides examples of finished illustrations and developmental sketches of animals. Charlie also shares a storyboard he created for an animated short and examples of his object and location studies. In his spare time, he posts art on Instagram and enjoys singing and playing ukulele.

1. Charlie Dickson.
Portfolio

2. What interests me:
I’ve always had a keen interest in cartoons since a young age, and
character design was always a specific area in the animation industry
that fascinated me the most. My goal for as long a I can remember is to
be a character designer for high end production companies like Disney,
Pixar, Aardman or Dreamworks. I frequently enjoy designing my own
original character and coming up with specific character designs that
suit the personalities I have formed for them.
Evaluation of my developed original character Siouxsie:
To the left here is an original character of mine called Siouxsie, she is a
gothic style lady with an elegant and mysterious
vibe. I wanted to translate aspects of Siouxsie’s
personality through visual language, for example her face
is built as an upside down tear drop, with the sharp
point of her chin having an almost triangular shape,
it represents her Sharp wit And plucky rebellious
personality, mixed with the soft elegant curves of the
teardrop quite Literally representing her soft side.
I also thought that the teardrop would be a funny motif for
the face as goths are very stereotypically seen as sad
individuals. I also went through a process of designing her
outfit to help represent her personality as well, using lots
of dark purple which represents her elegance and purple is
often associated as a rich colour. I also drew a bunch of
facial expressions to show how she would emote specific
emotions, and developed a bunch of outfits I believe would
work for her as an individual.

3. Here are some more illustrations that showcase my interests and artistic process
with designing characters:
Finalised character design of
my Character Erebus:
Erebus character
development:
Unnamed gamer girl
character design:
Original character Bo
the ghost design
development:

4. Development of my skills:
In the following sections you can see my life drawing, quick time
sketches, pose sketches, and charcoal work. The following drawings
show my studies in anatomy, life drawing, body and pose studies,
utilisation of different mediums, and practice in quick sketches.
Life drawing: Torso studies:
3-2 minute timed pose
sketches:

5. Development of my skills:
Pose studies :

6. Charcoal quick body pose sketches:

7. Body pose study:
Charcoal side profile
portrait:
Charcoal portrait.

8. Sketches and finished pieces:
Here is a finished illustration ( Above Left) and developmental sketch
(Above Right) of my Aunties Dog Bodhi. For the developmental sketch I
analysed the photo of bodhi I was referencing ( Left), looked at my sketch
and then picked out pieces of it that needed to change and made notes. The
notes I made on my sketch ended up being I needed to make it less static,
remove some fur on his left, and angle his face and head slightly to the
right. After making my changes to the sketch I began to ink in the pencil
sketch with a fine liner, add slight pencil shading, and colour his ears, paws
and tongue which left me with the finalised piece you see above.

9. Sketches and finished pieces continued:
The lovely Bodhi was actually part of a series of animal studies I was doing, you can see here that
I followed a similar process I did for bodhi for the two other animals I decided to draw, sketching
from a photo reference then finalising the piece.
Photo reference of “Weenie”.
Developmental sketch of “Weenie”.
Finalised Sketch of “Weenie”.

10. Sketches and finished pieces continued:
Photo reference of “Pretzel”. Developmental sketch of “Pretzel”. Finalised Sketch of “Pretzel”.

11. Animation showreel:

12. Storyboard:
Here I have a storyboard I have produced, which was made for an animation I wanted to make about the
heatwave that scathed everyone last summer in 2022.

13. Storyboard:

14. Object studies:

15. Place and Space studies :
Sketch of
castle I
found
during my
walks round
Cardiff
centre.

16. Support material :
I have my own
personal art
Instagram where
I take
commissions for
followers or
people who have
come by my page
and post personal
pieces of art.
@charlied.art
On Instagram.
One of my other hobbies other than
drawing is music, I mostly sing and play
ukulele, often covering and creating
original songs.