Life Drawing Session Number 2

In my second life drawing class of the year, Kathy told me that although my poses were fairly accurate and in proportion, they lacked a sense of life and this could be gained by exaggerating the angles of the body. I had a go at doing this in the 3rd image below, but all I really achieved was making the model's butt look really big and out of proportion.... so yeh gunna have to work on that one...

We then did a negative space drawing, in which we had to draw everything but the model. This was a far more technical approach to drawing: mine turned out alright but I didn't enjoy doing it, as it was a far more controlled way of working. In the last of my images we had a long pose, I made the torso too long and this threw off the rest of my drawing, so the head looks oddly small. I'm getting much better at capturing the poses more quickly though, I now need to work on exaggerating and my thickness of line I think.

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...

Pick 'N' MIx

In Pre Production we were each given 4 random cards: a style, character, setting and genre card which we had to combine to create an idea for an animation. I got Falmouth illustration student, angel, palace kitchens and documentary. I researched past illustration students' blogs to find a style I liked and found Patrick Atkins. I replicated some of his work to get a feel for his style:

His shapes are very simple and his marks are violent and scratchy. There is a prominent use of black and this is strongly contrasted by whites and off whites, creating strong lighting in his images which heightens the drama within them. The illustrations are quite dark in mood but the basic shapes used to create the characters prevent the images from being too sinister as it gives them a quirky edge. I felt this dark but quirky style would compliment the plot I came up with well....

So. The plot. The opening scene would show a lion killing a zebra, with the audience's sympathies lying with the zebra. But the lion would then die somehow and his spirit would find its way to this kind of no man's land, purgatory type place, where loads of spirits of different animals and humans are. There are entrances to lots of different heavens, as every species has a different heaven. But there is a mix up and the lion ends up in the wrong heaven: the zebra heaven. The zebras hate the lion because his kind kill zebras, so they ostracize him and force him to work in the Palace Kitchens, an underground dungeon beneath the palace where the leaders of zebra heaven live. The lion finds that many other predators have ended up in zebra heaven too and they, like him, have been banished to the palace kitchens.

The lion spearheads a revolt against the zebras, rallying up his fellow predators. But things get more complicated for him when a young zebra finds its way into the palace kitchens and befriends him. She shows him that not all the zebras are bad and wish to condemn him and the other lost animals to an eternity of slavitude. The lion tries to stop the uprising of the animals but it is already in too full a swing and they no longer listen to him. A great battle between the animals and zebras ensues and the young zebra gets caught up in it. The lion manages to rescue her and since everyone is distracted by the war the two friends manage to sneak out into the no man's land between all the heavens. The zebra helps the lion find the lion heaven and then there is a bittersweet parting as the lion and zebra cannot be together as they both must go to their respective heavens.

Here are some character designs I started on:

Final Funny In 15 Film

So here is the final version of our Funny In 15, I animated the character with the newspaper and Zoe animated the masturbating guy. It was pretty easy to animate and I was able to loop some parts too.

Funny In 15 Update

Here's the animatic for the new idea for our Funny In 15. This is the idea we actually stuck with.

As you can see, we are going for crude humour here, it's very simple but pretty much everyone seems to find it funny, so it looks like it's working :) 

I set about designing the chavvy masturbating character and here's what I came up with:

I decided to make him look more of an oafish, simple kind of chav rather than an aggressive one, as my early drawings were of this vein and I felt it took away the humour if he looked somewhat violent. I used basic curvy shapes and a smooth black outline as I was trying to keep it all simple as I think a simple style is better suited to comedy in most cases, especially crude humour.

In the end though we decided to use Zoe's character designs as they worked better with Elf's background.