Original Artwork by Scott Riddell
#RiddellSDesign
Friday 19 June 2026
Heric
About This Sketch
Heric is a character Scott has been developing for a little while. He’s already gone through a few redesigns, but this one captures well the style of Heric’s hometown as well as his unique style of dress as well.
Heric is based on the original concept for an animated short Scott has been working on called Spiriture, but with this new design Scott feels the character is closer to the style he would like to finish this animation in.
Unlike some of our previous posts, in this post we took the time to fully break down the character design, blending both the hand drawn design with a colour enhancing under layer in Photoshop. You can see in the images above, that from the original sketch, the hand drawn version of this character was integrated with this under then outlined to make it feel fully rounded out as a design.
When Scott then returned to this character as he was beginning to consider the background option he then redesigned the character once again, this time utilising his own skills as a character designer to create a fully digital rendering of Heric using the software Procreate.
After the Heric character sketch had been settled upon, Scott and Darren used AI in photoshop to generate some ideas for what this character’s background might look like. Scott has used these AI backgrounds in many of his pervious posts, but this time we felt it was time to use these generated images to inspire rather than to create and Scott picked his favourite elements from the generated images to create his own version of a background he could use for his work.
Side by side like this, we can better see how Scott used the generated image to create his own background in Procreate, which allowed him to create a finished design that was all his own work.
The final steps in finishing this design was to reintegrate the character sketch with this background and Scott’s patience paid off as Heric looks so well placed within this design. From hand drawn sketch to finished design it took Scott about two weeks to get this design finished, but with more of Scott’s own designs being featured it is well worth the wait to see projects like this come together.
The original image of the Heric was hand-drawn using coloured pencil on cartridge paper.
The featured image of the Heric was edited by DS Coremans using Photoshop. The initial image was enhanced by overdrawing with a digital render in a way that still allows all of Scott’s original design to be seen, but gives the character a more finished and fleshed-out feeling design. The backgrounds are digitally generated using prompts created by Scott, to help visualise the character in a setting that seems more suited to that character.
This hybrid work between Scott and Darren is something they have been working on together since early 2025, so that both of them can learn new skills, but also so that Scott can get a better sense of how these characters could be developed as he continues to work on his skills as an animator.
Key inspirations for Scott at the moment are from some of his favourite animated movies. These stills have been taken from the three animation design styles Scott is most interested in developing: Hand Drawn, Stop-Motion, and Digital Designs.
If you would like to see more of Scott’s work, or find out more about his designs, consider following Scott on his social media platforms, or by liking and sharing his post here on scottriddell.org
Stay Creative. Stay Safe. Stay Inspired.
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