✷ shape language fanatic ✷
Hello there, I’m Matt Johns!! a character, environment, narrative designer + concept artist who creates playful friends and playful imaginative worlds built using simple and graphic shape language in my own personal style. This is a page is for me to compile rough sketches for characters alongside brief narrative exploration - a lot of my work centers around repurposed shapes found from my own environment and is often noted alongside references + mood boards which inform the viewer in crafting compelling characters accompanied by bespoke narratives. If you enjoy my work and would like to create heartfelt stories and fresh characters together - of course feel free to contact me further, I would love to collaborate and would love to develop n’ design your ideas n’ characters further!!
the egg prince n’ the breakfast kingdom
character concept spread that explores some personal narrative about an egg prince ruling over his breakfast kingdom and it’s inhabitants - I wanted to explore how different shapes could express difference in breakfast foods, although the egg is fragile and soft it can also be flexible and expressive, I liked this duality and ability to enhance it’s movement and charismatic qualities that I was thinking about. toast n’ bacon are boxy and almost stand guard and block, so they’d be the guard force of this breakfast kingdom and then the waffle, they’re a little quirky, move fast and maybe a little more intense in characteristics.
a little ghostie
Brief character concept sheet for an adorable ghost that loves to make soup (even though they can’t actually eat it) - although they have a uniform, square form, this actually helps frame and create contrast when they interact with objects within the environment/scene. Whether it’s just for compositional purpose, the visual rhythm present in the design helps illustrate some key characteristics which help inform the viewer of who this character is and what their qualities are.
mushroom park ranger + forest fellas character designs
following a self-initiated prompt for #adventureapril2024 I started sketching a character who surveys n' conserves an endangered landscape - they carry loose nesting materials, they take care of orphaned eggs n' also plays a lil stick flute as they travel through this landscape - also an egg loving boy. he is often found balancing tasks and carrying out routine checkups on neighboring biomes and rewilding the natural world with the help of small characters called forest fellas.
Forest fells are characters that resemble elements of the natural environment, these adorable lil characters are carried around in the backpack of my mushroom park ranger character - they are scattered in areas of natural imbalance - these friends tend to the environment and help restore and protect the surrounding ecosystem, they do this by cleaning water, providing spaces of refuge for bugs n' other animals and self-plant and grow into plants and trees - helping create homes for endangered species and safeguarding wildlife. these characters were so fun to design n’ feel there are endless opportunities to generate new characters for different environmental settings. unconventionally n’ alternatively rich these characters take reference from real world foliage and minerals - I want to incorporate these characters into a tabletop game that spreads awareness of climate change, symbiosis n’ how to rewild landscapes.
palette pals character and colour exploration
Palette Pals are a series of drawings presented alongside my photography - brief moments in time that I take colour and mood references from. I have a sensory processing disorder and ADHD, so when I’m often out in public I find it difficult to concentrate - this series explores moments where I’ve captured compositional interest, colour palettes, form etc. I then take these photographs and start sketching characters and take swatches from the photographs to generate a colour palette that will then be used to render my character designs. this is second nature to my process at this point, finding ways to bridge analog/digital means of making is an enjoyable process and hope that others can see that making should be exploration and fun.
tiny garden character sticker designs
commissioned to design five characters for the game tiny garden - I personify crops that can be sown in the game; peppers, cacti, carrots, tomatoes n’ turnips into adorable little friends that will be rewarded to project backers supporting the kickstarter campaign. I wanted to craft these crop characters to help reflect all the cute quirks n’ feels this 90’s pocket toy aesthetic influenced farming sim offers.
sun and moon character designing
the sun and moon (the lonely star) is a self-initiated graphic novel project two characters - which follows the sun and the moon and their relationship. this was started during the pandemic and follows melancholic and uplifting themes about processing grief and moving on from relationships, we mainly follow the moon on an emotional journey in finding fragments of past love in a new environment, self-growth + personal developments. I have sketchbooks filled with visual development and exploration that are yet to be scanned, edited n’ compiled but will get to that shortly when I begin taking focus off of other work and projects. ideally I would love to pitch this idea to a publisher or even look into self-publishing - but who knows if I’ll revisit this haha!
have you heard of plonkton?
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have you heard of plonkton? ✷
let me know which plonkton you are!!
meet the newly discovered microscopic species called plonkton - a experiment influenced by my love of shape language and character design. 16 characters to choose from, with short descriptions of each of them, what they do etc. this was a character n' narrative exercise that I set for myself after finishing up on contract work, a breather to get me back into iterating on shape and forms to implement into designing characters. this little world was fun to explore n’ I can see this going in different directions. I would really like to revisit this as a larger project further, maybe start playing with environment design and other aspects of world-building also.