Style Update For 'Chasing Birds'

The birds animation, which now has the working title of 'Chasing Birds', required a style and so the tutors gave us the Art Deco style card, telling us to focus on 1920s Vogue covers. My group was really pleased with this as the fairly regal looking illustrations suit the Victorian England scenes extremely well. The Vogue style makes use of angular face shapes combined with flowing, curvaceous bodies, pouting lips, small delicate nose shapes and slitted eyes, all of which sexualises the women. The clothes are often quite detailed in contrast to the basic face shapes. A washed out watercolour style adds to the delicacy of the images, as do the soft grey outlines. Patterns are a common feature of Vogue covers, sometimes filling background space or being applied to clothes. 

Below are some images that I copied to get a feel for the Vogue style. 

I then set about implementing this style into my designs for the girl, named Eliza, who is the protagonist of the story. Eliza is meant to be about 10 and this posed a problem as all of the Vogue women have very angular faces with strong bone structure and obviously little girls have rounded softer faces... so the youngest I could get her to look while still retaining a Vogue feel was mid teens. Eliza is also meant to be this athletic tom boy and not sexualised in any way, so again it was tricky to get that Vogue influence in without altering the characteristics of the girl.  Below is my design development, ending with the final coloured version, incorporated into an action shot as we've been told our characters need to be shown doing what they will be doing in the animation, rather than just standing about which is the kind of 'go to' pose people (like me) do when designing characters.

I think I've got the body shape looking quite Vogue like although in the final version I did make the legs too skinny. The rips at the bottom of the T-shirt are too long and distracting, so would need to be reduced greatly in size. The background sky works well and retains the style nicely.

Eline then took my design and put her own twist on it:

So we all decided this worked better as she looks the right age of about 10 and has quite a boyish figure. It will also be easier to animate as the shapes are simpler than mine and the hair is far less complex, with only a few strands... since mine was fairly crazy looking and would literally be impossible to animate in the time frame we have... it would've looked good though...