The character board is a collection of different textures or colours that you think is appropriate for a given character within a play or film context. I decided to do the sugarplum fairy as I knew we were gonna have a project on the Nutcracker coming up and I wanted to further explore this character and different aspects that could be included for costume for her as well as just in general her oeuvre.
When creating this character board, it allowed me to learn the new skills of cropping as well as select certain parts of the image before pasting it onto the main character board. I found it really interesting process to learn how to use the different selecting tools such as the polygonal and magnetic lasso selecting tool and the object automatic selecting tool. My favourite to use was the automatic object selecting tool as it allowed me to quickly get an overview of what I wanted to be selected.
I then liked refining my selections using the quick mask mode and select and mask settings. The quick mask mode allowed me to edit my selection using the brush tool to allow any detail not selected using the object selection tool to be added to the selection with the aid of the paint brush tool. To further refine I also found the select and mask settings very useful with the view in black-and-white. This allowed me to give different finishes to the edges whether I wanted to be feathered (e.g. the netting) or smoother (e.g. the ribbon) and allowed for variety to be within my character board as I collected all these textures together.
I think that this overall, I found this task really useful and I have since used these skills in other modules for other mood boards. The selection tool I would use again as my go to would be the object selection tool, followed by quick mask tool for refinement; however, it was very useful to have and to learn about and be aware of the other ones just in case I ever need those as well. Next time I would also want to try and experiment more with changing and adding colour and opacity once having the layers on the character board. I did not really experiment much with that one in this example because the majority have with the right colours and I did not need anything to be more opaque than already was but I definitely want to try and use this in future boards as I think it could be a really useful and effective way to layer stuff.
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