There’s nothing new about the intersection of fashion and gaming. For as long as you’ve been able to slap Super Mario on a T-shirt, there’s been a relationship between the two worlds. But recently, the nature of that relationship has been shifting. In-game, players have an ever-growing array of options to outfit their characters, and more and more often those options are coming from brands we also encounter IRL. Online, iconic characters and Esports gamer celebrities are being tapped to “model” clothes for fashion lookbooks. In the future, you might be just as likely to purchase virtual products as you are physical ones. In this project, our students explore dressing the metaverse in one of four game options: Animal Crossing, Just Dance, League of Legends, or Fortnite.
Mentored by: Beth Wilson from BethCaitlinWilsonArt (Fashion and Illustration) & Jennifer Barrett (Fashion)
Project Contributors: Lucy Kyriakidou (Art Director/Freelance Games Artist) – http://www.lucydoesart.co.uk/
Project Outline:
Our digital and physical worlds are constantly blending, especially now that more young people are spending more time online. Similarly, the creative worlds of character design and the fashion industry are blending too. This project sits perfectly at the overlaps of these blending worlds, allowing students to research and explore character design, gaming, and fashion. After exploring fashion and gaming collaborations, researching the style and craft of their favourite characters and games, and learning about drawing techniques for gaming, students will create their own final illustrated character for the game they selected. If you are interested in digital fashion, fashion technology, character design, gaming, or fashion illustration, this is the project for you!
The Brief:
How do you develop a character design with gaming in mind? How do you draw them with the correct technique? What can you learn from a 2D artist and games designer? How do you combine fashion and gaming? Through mentorship and your own research, you will design and illustrate an original character for either Fortnite, Animal Crossing, Just Dance, or League of Legends. Using your research as visual and logical inspiration, you will use traditional or digital mediums to finalise a character.
Your final character will be digitised, and your outcome will be a professional and polished edit of your original character in its designated game.
Project Results: Please view the final results of the students’ work from John Spence Community High School:
Thank you & well done!
All we have left to say is thank you and well done, not only to the students but to the teachers at John Spence Community High School, North Tyneside Learning Trust, to the companies that have supported and contributed to this project and the TICE team that plugged away at the project week after week.
To the students – we hope you have enjoyed this project, we hope in years to come that you can proudly present an industry written project you did, achieved, quite frankly smashed. Well done and congratulations from everyone here at TICE.