sketchbook 3

Sketchbook

All of these sketches were from a trip to the museum i leeds where i was doing quick sketches of different items from the cabinets, the layout and structure. As i had a lot of time on this day i did a lot of sketches which i think really benefitted me in helping me get into sketching and drawing quickly and doing animals which i am not confident at drawing. Overall i did not want to use this location as my environmental storytelling which i intended to do at the start but i still found it very useful and fun to do and attempt.

After looking at these i found i liked doing birds and they do look like what they are supposed to for the parrot but for other animals like the duckbill platypus and porcupine, that i really need to learn how to make them look realistic and grasp how their bodies look at different angles.

sketchbook 2

Sketchbook

This sketch was done when i was sat in a cafe bar and loved the way the bar curved around and had so many different elements to the overall look. This was a very edgy bar with the taps that were created by pipes and game machine in the corner so i really enjoyed drawing it and getting more understanding of sketching when i am out and about in different places. I like how this sketch turned out as i was able to show lots of different small details from within this bar so it was nice spending a bit of time just getting detail and placements of items from this area.

This was the scene i was drawing and as you can see the walls were graffiti and the bar was very retro so it was a great environment to get a sketch, if i could have stayed longer i would have sketched at least another 3 to get a full look at the whole room around me.

This was another sketch i did on a walk around leeds. This was a church building that had a dramatic impact on the business buildings around it and i loved how much it stood out and looked unique. I didn't have time to do a fully detailed sketch but it was one i did quickly to get the placement and angle of where i saw the entrance behind the small tree. I sketch quite quickly in pen and helps sections to stand out so i found if i want to do thumbnails and quick drawings, pen and biro is the medium i will choose.

sketchbook 1

Sketchbook

As part of the sketchbook brief i have been sketching in different location around Leeds and where i live in Harrogate. The brief we were given was about drawing on a regular basis to keep practicing and working outside of tasks and get better at drawing and improving. I wasn't always good at working in sketchbooks and sketching everywhere i go but after this brief i am finding it very useful and is helping me work on background and environments.

Here i have done two sketches when i was on the train sat in two different seats to get different angles and perspectives. I really like how they turned out as you can see what they are and how the train looks with some of the detail that i could capture quickly. I also find pen is always a good medium to get detail in quick and easily so this is why i chose to use them for these sketches.

Visual Language- Study Task 2 - Captain Character- Character Design & Professional Practice -Character Traits

Character Design & Professional Practice- Character Traits

How to Train Your Dragon had a lot of character design in the Dreamworks book i have been reading. They manage to show so much character within each person that other animators struggle to show.

Here you can see Astrid who was supposed to be an angry teenager who was a girl trying to prove herself to be as good as the male characters around her. You can tell this by her sarcastic slightly angry expression and strong stance.

Hiccup was the main character in this movie so his design really needed to show what his personality was. In these designs bellow, you can see from his expressions, that he is awkward. This can be seen by his quirky wobbly stance and face showing uncertainty.  This is why he was such a success, as he was the underdog that normally wouldn't play the lead in a movie so this was a good design for the character designers to come up with.

This is clearly a bad character as he is made with sharp lines, spikes and a white grey colour scheme so he is not warm. This is fairly simple to do as he is a cold colour who looks like a very obvious evil character so Dreamworks clearly wanted it to come across as him being bad from the first glance.

Visual Language- Study Task 2 - Captain Character- Character Design & Professional Practice- How to Animate Film Cartoons

Character Design & Professional Practice-

How to Animate Film Cartoons by Preston Blair

Preston Blair's book How to Animate Film Cartoons is a brilliant book to look at character design from the basics, as he shows how to take simple shapes and turn them into completely different characters. This is an important stage when animating as you need to understand shapes and the basics before you can build them up into the characters you see as the end result. This can be seen in this images where it shows what is underneath the characters to make the final view.

This is also shown with designing the head shapes and facial features. I did this stage at the beginning as it can drastically change the overall look of the character your designing and going for. For example, small round heads create cuter characters visually, and long heads with droopy eyes create a simple and tired character. These are good to experiment with as you could change the outcome of your characters look with very small shape changes, even if you didn't think you could find a better design, looking into this could help you find out if you can make your character better. 

The book also shows things like pose references and angles of the character so animators can understand how to create a full 36oº of their character and it be able to look the same from every direction. This is important for when it does to animating them as you need to be able to keep the overall look of the character the same so the animation looks correct as well as getting the overall look to be to a high standard.

Visual Language- Study Task 2 - Captain Character- Character Design & Professional Practice- Dreamworks

Character Design & Professional Practice:

Dreamworks

I have had this book for quite a few year that is all about the art that comes out of Dreamworks. This book has many different types of styles, concepts and character designs that i found i could show for this brief.

One thing Dreamworks always makes sure of, is that even if they are designing a quirky unusual character, they must always fit within the scenes and backgrounds of the movies. 

This is one of the character from Kung Fu Panda that was a creature that didn't really fit with what was going on yet they designed him in a way that let them use him and many others that were different like having just one Panda. They did this with his clothes, movements and colours that match the Chinese backgrounds so it all tied in which is why Dreamworks are so clever with how they construct their characters.

Here are some character designs for the dragons used in How to Train Your Dragon. By using different shapes, each dragon gains a different personality so they stand apart. When animals are for specific people, to make them gain more personality, artists subtly or obviously make them look like their owners. This has been done as some of the dragons have attitude, are larger than the others and have two heads for the twins.

One thing i didn't realise from Dreamworks was that they did colour pallets. To design these characters they would have needed different tones for the shading and highlights, as well as for different items of clothing. Here they have shown one of the main colours from each and shown how they have been used.

This book has really helped me to understand how professionals do their art and what standard it has to be and their general thought processes for each characters design.

Visual Language- Study Task 2 - Captain Character- Character Design & Professional Practice- Bringing the Character to Life

Character Design & Professional Practice-

Bringing the Character to Life

This stage is not done through the animating, it is done through the extensive amounts of research, designing and redrawing the same character to build them into something amazing. To get the audience to get attached to your character, you have to get attached till they are seen as almost a real character to you. This is why Pixar, Disney and Dreamwork's are always seen as the main animation company, they create a story and characters that stick with the audience for generations, this clearly shows that the stage of designing is one of the most important. They need to spend so much time getting the character as good as possible for the animation team to make them into something great.

I have found many images showing how the process of designing the character of UP were very extensive. As you can see, the  concept designers and character designs constantly change because the overall look had not been found yet. This is why they spend so long doing it. Carl could have been thin, tall and some with colourful blond hair. This really would have been different from the character they chose but he would have been lacking in the overall feel you got from the typical grumpy small old man that they chose who pulled on children's and adults heart strings so much.

I love this stage because of the possibilities that can come of going out of the box and designing different characters as anything could be the end result but you dont know till you try them all. This also shows what each designers work looks like, each one has a different look to it but you can clearly see they all belong to the same movie and are the same concept of character, this also helps the people who make the final call, look at what can be achieved and which ones look the best.

Visual Language- Study Task 2 - Captain Character- Character Design & Professional Practice- Facial expressional

Character Design & Professional Practice-

Facial expressional

“The eyes are the windows to the soul, and how they are drawn expresses any number of emotions. Their size and position conveys something about your character: bigger eyes tend to give a sense of childishness or childlike wonder, smaller ones a sense of seriousness and depth, wide-set eyes gives a sense of oddity, while close-set eyes are often comic.”-Anima Boutique

Facial expressional are some of the most key things in creating a character everyone will love and understand. People need to understand what your character is thinking and feeling with small movements of their face. These are also some of the few things that are universally understood, this is important in an animation where the character cant talk or the animation is silent as it is one of the rare things that can be shown to people all over the world, and they will understand the emotions and words even though there is no sound. This is because even when the language is different, the expressions more often than not, stay similar enough for people to understand the context and in depth emotions a character can be portraying just with their face.

WALL-E was an amazing example of characters that say so much with so little, WALL-E had body movements and eye tilts to show how he was feeling and what he was thinking which proved extremely effective with him ending up being such a loved character by the audience, this is also shown by EVE who worked out even harder for the animators as he could only show two eye crescents of emotion. Yet they still managed to get her to be understood and loved.

Sadness with her eyes cast downward

Fear as he body is pulled in tight in fright         Wonder as he is captivated with the object he has found   

Another amazing classic character would be Gromit, with just eyebrows, they have been able to give him more effective emotions than some human characters have ever show. He has been revolutionary in understanding how people can read the smallest of eye, face and body movements and really let the animators understand how facial features can move such small amounts and say so much.

Here you can really see just how small amounts of changes can make his emotions look totally different. This really does show you how important the faces are and the facial features, as any changes in placement can change the whole look of the character and how sure small changes can have a very large effect.

   

Visual Language- Study Task 2 - Captain Character- Making a Puppet

Character Puppet

To test out other ways to make out characters, we tried puppets. These were made of wood and were held together with wire so it could stand and be bent at the joints. This is another way to make a character other than using wire as it is harder and can be built on faster. You can then cover it like a character or use it for poses, or even just to build your characters clothes on so they can be the correct size before breaking the easily made puppet so the clothes are the completely right shape and can then be built onto your other models.

This was after i had fully built my model as i had a basic human shape to cut out which made the process very easy to complete. I have experience working with wood so i knew how to use the machines and get the correct shapes so i did this all completely independently. I do think if i had more than a day to complete this puppet i would have done it in 3D, this would have involved carving and sculpting my character, which would have been very hard and advanced but would have been interesting to try out.

The wood we were using was prone to splitting so when drilling, it split. This happened easily when i was drilling the hands and other small features on this model but even on the legs and arms, i found it started cracking in half, to fix this i added glue and then held it together with masking tape so it glued tight. I used quite a good amount of glue as this type of wood tends to soak it up so this means it is now reinforced and stronger.

As i had extra time at the end the tutor said i could do a round base, this was done on one of the new machines i had not come across that slowly cut the wood while you turned it in a circle so it didn't split and made a nice clean sharp cut. This machine also made sure the wood stayed completely centred so the circle was exactly round and in the same place.

This is my character fully on the board so she is standing and can spin and move her limbs. Overall though, i would improve this design as she is such a basic shape that it doesn't look very good overall. Next time i will defiantly make sure to do her 3D with her body built up and her legs thick and all making her look like the character i designed, not just a basic human form.

Even though i knew how to use the drills, machines and sanders, i had never attempted to make a puppet so this was a good learning experience as i had never made something so small out of wood as i'm used to making desks and much larger designs so this is why i struggled so much. Next time if i'm chiseling i think it will be hard to think of the design so you dont chisel off too much but it will make a much more realistic finished design. I will make these changes next time to get a better result i can be more proud of.

Visual Language- Study Task 2 -You Spin Me Right Round- Character turnaround 360

360º Character Turn Around

This is the final animated look at my character doing a 360º turn around so you can see every angle of her and what she looks like from any point. From what i thought would be an easy task, this turned out to be quite hard as you had to work out 30º movements so some of the angles i found hard and they do look a bit different from what the character looks like at other view points but overall i feel it looks good for my first attempt at drawing one character at multiple angles.

I have done this in pen as it matches what she looks like in all of my character sheets as it makes her stand out so you can see all the details and movements. One thing i found hard was to show how she looked like turning when you could see less of parts of her. This was mostly with the shoulders as it was being able to make them look 3D but look like they are disappearing behind her when she is turning.

If i were to do this again i would draw out every degree carefully so i could make sure it was exactly right, this would be looking at the feet, shoulders and face to make sure they really show how much of the body changes with such small movements. This was a good task to set because i thought it would be very easy until i thought about how many images go into turning a character around, 12 designs, all showing different sides of the body. So overall i think i learned how hard it was to plan out every angle of the body i'm designing and how to design with the thought of making it and making it 3D. Doing a character to look human turned out to be the hardest thing i've done because doing a cartoon looking character means its easier to get the face to look the same compared to a human one.

Here i have also made a Gif of my modelled character as it shows her in a background and all of the angles. As you can clearly see because of the way we had to attach them to the boards, my character has ended up on a tilt so she does not spin straight. This would be different next time as i would make sure the feet were equal and body was straight.

I did not know how to make a Gif beforehand so this took some time, as well as learning how to take out a green screen background and add a different one in. This did not take too long but it was confusing when it came to changing all the aspects of the render to get it to a good quality and size. I wish i had also been able to make this before doing the turnaround so my character could have been done easier as i could physically see her from all angles. I know this for the future so i will design a character that looks more like the designs and the turnaround would be easier with a Gif at hand.

Visual Language- Study Task 2 - Captain Character- Building the character

Building my Character

After designing my character i then built it up from an armature to a plasticine model. Here are the stages it took to build her fully.

First i did a rough sketch of my character to the scale i needed to build her as. I then drew the skeleton where the metal was going to be, leaving sections longer as they were to be tied around the spine, hips and shoulders. 

I then did an extra drawing of where the muscle of my character was and where i needed to build her up from. I have done these to show where the milliput needs to go as it gets hard and makes joints and sections bendable. It is also used so the feet are hard when holding the bolts to keep the character on the base.

This is the wire frame i have built up so i can use it to build my character on. I started by simply twisting two pieces of metal together so it is thicker for me to use and is less likely to snap. I then cut the lengths of my legs using my scale model. Then curled the feet around making sue a bolt will securely hold in place with the milliput. I then spun the spin onto the legs so it is held in place before then making the arms and hands. Then lastly was curling the head into the correct shape. This was all very simple but it took time as i was using a think metal so it made the bending of metal harder to do. I didn't snap the metal as i was gentle with it and took my time making sure it was precise.

This was just after i put milliput on my model. The feet are now holding the bolts to attach to the board so now once it has dried i can make my model secure. I have also placed it on the joints and hands so when bending, it bends at the joints and not at any point on the arms. 

Now i have to wait for it to dry which takes a few hours before i can build on it as i need it to dry hard.

I have spent a lot of time building this up as it is so hard to get the character to look smooth. I then added the boots and skirt so it looks loosley like my character so far. I have only added the nose so far but even that was tricky as it is so small and my hands became very unsteady so adding the details were harder.

This is my final character fully covered in plasticine. I found this whole process very enjoyable but it was very hard and i dont like how my character turned out as she doesn't look enough like the character i draw and is too flat. I didn't do well with creating a character that was fully 3D as she still looks rather flat on the face and skirt so i would try to make her fully 3D next time i try to use this medium.

I am happy to to have a completed character and for my first time using this i was happy to be able to know how to use it in the future. For the shoes, skirt and armour, i mixed my own colours as i did not like any of the basic shades that were available. I am happy with how the hair turned out as it is small rolls and small thin strips that come down as the hair coming out of the ponytail so it looks very effective as the hair. I also like the belt as the buckle looks quite like an actual buckle so that section looks good, its just the torso that is too small so it throws off the whole look as the shoulders then look way too big and bulky. The eyes took me a while as they were to small. The pupils needed to be straight so this took time and effort trying to get them looking exactly on the right point of the eye.

Overall i am happy to have it completed but there's many things i would like to change in the future so i would add all these aspects to the next character that i design if i were to build them again for any stop motion. This was a helpful experience as i got to know the stages that needed to be done when building and i now know what to apply as improvements for my next plasticine model.

Visual Language- Study Task 2 - Captain Character- Weapon Concepts and Finalised Design

Weapon Concepts and Finalised Designs

When designing my character i decided to make a warrior. As she is a warrior, she needs weapons. For this i did design sheets showing 4 designs of shields and 7 swords. I had some difficulty choosing which ones to draw so i went to the Royal Armouries and looked at the extensive weaponry they have on display there. I thought when they were left with pen outlines, they were too plain so i did them in pen and ink. This worked really well as the shields look warn and like wood, and the swords are really white on the blades, and dark and shaded on the hilt and detailing on the metal.

I found it was very important to have her with the correct weaponry so i made sure to research into different styles for different eras. This can be seen on the last shilled and second to last sword as they are clearly of a more Roman look and some are more like Greek Weaponry so i had to make sure to pick the correct designs for my character. This is why i chose the round shield and the third sword in. These match with my ear on the 14-15 century quite well and really look like they match her armour. I showed this by drawing her to one side to her correct hear height so i could see how big the weapons are to her size so when it comes to animating, people can see how big they should be.

I think this stage was done well as it is clear what i was drawing and i have looked at front back and sides for the shield and sword so different angles can show width and dimensions. I t also looks god with the character in colour as she is the finished design and this makes her stand out and her weapons look bold.