Character modelling - head

My TV idents will mainly feature a character, acting as my made up channel's mascot, having mini adventures or whatever I plan on doing with him.

So far, all I've done is his head:



I've named this character "Ste", taking just the first three letters of my name, as I normally would after getting a high score on a videogame.

Before I started on this, I looked everywhere for a character modelling tutorial of some sort, and also one on how to make his hat. After giving up that search, I decided the best thing would be to learn how to do it myself.

Basically, for the head, all I've done so far is used a sphere, applying materials to colour the top half red for his hat and the bottom half his skin colour. Then, I converted the sphere into an editable mesh, and selected an area of red at the front to extrude as the peak of his cap.

For the eyes, I've taken inspiration from Japanese Anime and Manga, particularly a character style known as "chibi", or alternatively "super-deformed", and have given him a pair of big, black, cute eyes and a blank facial expression. Originally, I planned to use bitmap materials for the eyes, as I initially felt that making the eyes in 3D would be difficult – ironically, modelling the eyes turned out to be far easier, and they look much better than I anticipated.

I have also done a test animation of sorts, but all I've made him do is blink:



Basically, I made him blink by adding two boxes which appear when the eyes disappear: I simply right clicked on the objects, chose object properties and adjusted the visibility for each key frame of the animation.

I'm pleased with how this is turning out so far, hopefully by the end of this week I'll have done a bit more to him.