Character design for ‘Churchy the Grinder’

Character designCharacter illustrationCommercal illustrationIllustration

20 Jan

This was an awesome collaboration with @vivalazoom, who asked me to create the characters and ‘world’ for an animated advert, for their client Capstone Machine Refurbishment Services.

Screenshot of video footage showing the main characters in factory surroundings. Churchy is a large mechanical grinder, with his owner Mr Capstone standing beside him. — Screenshot from final video footage showing a happy, mended Churchy and Kevin (Mr Capstone) - rendered image by Viva La Zoom based on character design by Melanie Williamson

Churchy the grinding machine was the star of the show, who in the animation goes from sad, broken and unused to chirpy, sparkling and like new 🙂

Character design sketches by Melanie Williamson illustrator, showing the main character 'Churchy' the grinding machine and the singing spanners. — Initial sketches of Churchy and the ‘singing spanners’

Headshot sketch of Churchy the Grinder

We shortened Churchy’s body to make him feel cuter :)

Sketches of spanners with characterful faces and hair features from different angles and placement lines — So much fun to create these spanner characters! 🛠️

Character sketches of workmen in different positions in blue, green and red outline. — Some more character sketches 🙂

I also got to make-up a couple of workmen characters alongside the bossman Kevin.

Front and side view sketches of Mr Capstone with placement lines. — Initial sketches of Mr Capstone (Kevin)

Sketches of one of the workmen in overalls from front and side view and placement lines. Kevin's head face-on beside him. — One of the workmen characters - my favourite monobrow 🙂

The character Mr Capstone in rendered 3D format!

This project was so much fun and quite different to my usual work, which required drawing the characters at different angles so that Guille could make them 3D and animated.

From my first sketches to seeing the progess and what an awesome job Guille did in making the end product look so very cool, it really was a wonderful project to work on.

Just look at Churchy’s little face 😍