Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Character Visualization: Their space

I use Excel for various writing organizational tasks and I also like to play around with the different options/tools. While playing with the insert-shapes I  discovered a frame shape. After putting frames around random pictures I thought this might be a good exercise to visualize what a character's space could look like. It's another dimension for getting to know characters better.

In addition to figuring out what your character might have in their space it is also fun to figure out where various things came from. It's almost like brainstorming in a way to tease out more details about a character and their relationships.

For example, with this bird picture maybe it belongs to a young woman and she has hung on her living room wall. Well most of the time. Maybe she really dislikes birds but the framed picture was a gift from her boyfriend the budding nature photographer so she doesn't want to hurt his feelings. She keeps it in a drawer most of the time then makes sure it's displayed when he's coming over. And maybe he notices the little amount of dust on it compared to her other nick-knacks. He could wonder if she's hiding it, or he could think that she's taking extra special care of it because it's from him.

The bird picture is one I took this spring, the texture on the frame is a default pattern in Excel, and the purple around the picture is supposed to be wall color. The frame shape isn't curved by default, I transformed it to a free-form shape then edited the points. I'm thinking of putting together a little walk through post on some of the Excel options I used here.

2 comments:

Cinette said...

I wish I was this techy! I struggled for almost an hour just trying to connect to the wifi at a coffee shop!

Claire Goverts said...

Thanks. I've used various graphics programs over the years and I also enjoy trying various options in whichever program I'm using. The basic shapes in Excel are pretty easy to use, editing the points to make the frame curved is something I first learned how to do in Photoshop.

Until college I never really was very techy, I learned a lot through my work study job.