Character design analysis #30

 For my 30th character design analysis I wanted to look at Ryu, I was sketching him from another artist today and noticed a few things about his overall design that I wanted to make note of. What one can notice in all of the street fighter characters is the design is not so much in the abundance of clothes or gadgets but actually in the simplicity of the color choices and the use of straights and curves that gave the drawing a very different feel  than most anime inspired works I see. It feels somewhere in between anime and realistic.

We see for instance a lot of curves used for the anatomy especially for the arms and head. There is a back and forth approach with these here while we see a lot more straights used in the longer lines of the clothing and his belt. What contrasts against these long wavy curvy lines is also the use of small triangular straight shapes in  a few key areas. For instance we see these shapes in his hair and along the splits of his gi on his legs and shoulders/arms. 

The color coordination is obvious but something worth noticing. He is patterned, red black and white and this use of 3 colors is also used in other designs in street fighter. Returning temporarily to the design of the shapes itself we can see that there is a contrast of different line shapes, especially in the cloth that make it so well designed. For instance on the bottom sketch in the center we see a strong straight bow outwards and go towards his knee from his hip, this curve gets inverted to swing back the other way and then curves in again towards the bottom of the pants where we get a bundle of shapes here and then follow the straights to the other side and we see the direction of these curves and even a few straights contrast in direction to the lines on the other side of the shape.