Emotional Ties: The Hunter

From the research I did on victorian men that went hunting I have designed a character for the hunter in the scary story. I then have tried out a number of styles, designs etc and have developed the character. This is the process I went through..

These are my initial drawings. 

I then tried this style where he is filled in with black and the lines become invisible so that you can see through to the background. To show this I decided to find and example of a background and put the character in it.

I found this quite effective but wasn't entirely happy with it as it's not really like Lotte Reinigers style.

I then digitally rendered him with greyscale, a bit like I did when I drew him into my sketchbook. I liked this, but again it wasn't the effect I was looking for.

I then rubbed the lines out and put him in the background, I quite liked this but again, it's not very silhouettey like Lotte Reiniger' style. 

So then I roughly filled in the character and made him all black, but I wasn't quite sure. It felt very harsh and some parts of the character disappeared in the backgrounds. I also felt it didn't have a very exciting outline. 

So I tried to recreate the character using shapes to make the outline much more detailed and exciting. But I didn't like this either, it lacked the character and personality.

So I went back to the original character and drew out some patterns, made them see through and played with the transparency. I was pretty pleased and quite liked this. However something still wasn't right and it did have that character that Lotte Reinigers has. 

After some thinking I look at some more of Lotte's work and discovered that I had a key problem that was stopping me getting my desired effect...The backgrounds in Lotte Reinigers animations were much lighter than the characters and didn't have much contrast, the example background I used was the complete opposite. So I tested my different styles on a new background...

I still didn't like this one, especially with the background change, it was way too harsh.

This was ok, but didn't have the silhouette effect, the same with the next one.

This one better but again I felt was too harsh, so I changed the transparency...

And I much preferred it, it gave more of the effect of shadows, like the Chinese shadow puppets that Lotte used as inspiration. 

I tried the last one out, and didn't like it as much. 

And so I have decided to use the silhouette character, that you can sort of see through to the background. I feel that it gives a good effect and would also put across the ghostliness of the story well too. I am very happy with the result of this.