COP sketchbook - Designing Dracula

To make sure I do not make too many of these, I wanted to save a lot of time and words to explain the choices I made in the designing of my own Dracula. Due to time constraints I have reigned back my final outcome to character sheets and keyframes, rather than a fully animated outcome, as I thought the character and setting was more important than the actual animation, as it represents the essence of what my question is all about, and also, with some noted aid explains how these designs tie in to the social context of today and also keep within the general rules of the character.

As is obvious from the pictures above, I actually made 2 passes at the classic take on the character. To design him I looked at fashion of the time period, as well as the movies and fiction of the character that existed at the time to make sure I was making him time specific. I also followed the colour palette I had made from the 1931 Dracula movie in order to make him more authentic. He is heavily based on Belo Lugosi, but obviously he is meant for an animated setting, rather than a live action. I wanted very much to keep within the realm of "gentlemen vampire" as this is who the character was at the time, and I needed to make sure I respected that. I actually like this version of the character the most, I think there is actually somewhat frightening about the upper class person taking advantage of their power in order to kill the lower class person. I think this is something that is used a lot in movies today, but I think this is where it started, with the Vampire and horror movies of this era.

Here you can see my process for designing the modern Dracula. For this, using my research of modern day men's fashion, I decided to use the colour script from the 2014 movie "Dracula Untold". I believed that this would supply me with at least most of the colours I could use to create and effective Dracula. The designing of this one, ended up becoming designing a fashionable high class man of the modern day, because I wanted to stick to the Gentleman Vampire aspect of which Dracula had started as. I think today more than ever there is fear of the upper class being above and being able to take advantage of the lower class people, so this is something that I wanted to play on in the designing of this version. He is very pale in skin tone and has bright yellow eyes, just to drive the inhuman aspect home, rather than him being generic white guy from any movie ever. I decided with this version, to make him quite muscular, as Dracula's whole point is to draw people in, and then murder them by sucking on their blood, I thought he had to be as attractive as possible from a 2018 stand point in order to make him an effective gentleman killer.