Mime Development

After the style development post yesterday I thought I should probably post the development of the mime characters. I like the old guy with the cane, hence stylising him, I also like the tall guy in the centre. You might be seeing him in a realistic light as I am still not sure how the story is going to go ...we'll see...

My Attempt At THE New Style

So I got some inspiration from the animations I found late last night, and if I'm honest some of Mat's work. Using a similar method I produced this.

And I am very happy with the results :D It is just how I pictured it in my head. 

I should have saved it in stages to show my workings but I forgot...so here's how I did it...

- I started with the outline and then cleaned it up quite a bit (omitting the hands). 

- Then greyed the whole character in and worked on the tonal range on 2 different layer, one for highlights and the other for shadows.

- After this it was relatively easy to just add the colour on a new layer and I was nearly done. 

- And with some tweaks to the shading I was done...makes it sound easy but it took the most part of 2 hours to complete!

Oh and I added a photo texture over the top set to Difference and reduced the opacity to around 50%. this gives it a nice tactile look.

Now I know what I'm doing I feel more confident to be able to produce more work like this as I now have a proper working timeline.

Oh and the mime idea is back in the mix...if you didn't guess already ^_^

Byyyyyee

Life Drawing

It's been a while since I last posted, I have been pretty busy with work and fun days out recently! :) But now back to the hard work, only 5 weeks to go and I thought I'd do some life drawing to help with my character designs.  
I plan to us the poses as a base line for one of my Space story characters, stylising it to fit with the style of the story and my other main character.

These sketches were very...sketchy, so I cleaned them up a bit with the eraser tool and I think they came out quite well. Maybe some proportion issues on one or two but overall I am pleased with them. (still can't really draw realistic hands and feet though)

Now to start designing a new character as fast as I can!

Spacemen and Their Development

A little earlier than promised but here are my initial sketches of spacemen:

I'm liking the top 3 non-defined sketches, the ones that aren't too realistic, as I find that you can better characterise them when animating with all sorts of squash and stretch techniques that wouldn't necessarily look right with an anatomically correct body.

Need to work on some suitable head gear, even though I like the top right helmet, I'll see if I can develop something better based around that idea. It depends on how my story goes, which is one of 2 directions...yet to decide and finalise it.  If I go for a more serious story I think I'll go for something more in the style of the bottom right design, this is because it would be more suitable to the storyline.

Done and Dusted but Time is Running Out

So that's one idea down...only 5 to go! I have finished my character profile sheet and feel I have a strong synopsis for my Mayfly Idea.

I feel like I'm running out of time rapidly, I still have 2 ideas to finish off for this project and I haven't even started my 3 ideas for the Futures project yet!  Looks like there are some late nights ahead.

I have however done some research into spacemen/astronauts for my character development for my spaceman idea.

When doing some research into real astronauts/spacemen, I realised that the equipment that they had to carry was much too cumbersome and as a result I wouldn't be able to characterise the main character to suit the story.  So I stripped down the main features and used only the essentials, and since the character won't really be in space as such, I can get away with giving him less gear.  Here are the original reference images I found.

After this I looked at fictional spacemen and also found that a lot didn't wear anywhere near as much equipment.

Here's a link sowing some great retro fictional space suits, many seem to try and accurately copy the nasa space suits, and other just go all out and throw a curve ball...as William Shatner demonstrates.

I'll post some development sketches up tomorrow, for now however I must go to work!

The Mayfly

After watching Ryan Woodward's 'Thought of You' it sparked inspiration for an idea, in short, the life of a mayfly. This idea is solely in 2D and hand drawn so I think this might be more down Mat's street :p and it's something that I have always wanted to do but never felt confident enough doing.  However because my idea is quite simple I feel we could definitely achieve this to a high standard! I'll email Mat with the full rough storyline and some sketches.

Using either photoshop or just pencil, I want the whole thing to be hand drawn with the backgrounds and characters being on different layers to give the animation depth.

I did a little research and found they begin life in a larval form known as a nymph.  Whilst in their nymph form they like to live under stones in fast flowing water or among plants in slow streams.  They usually stay in this state for around 1 year before all hatching out together and only living for between a few minutes and a day, this is because their mouths seal up as soon as they hatch from their nymph shells...weird! During this time they over run some towns and become a huge pest for people for a very short amount of time. I thought it would be interesting to see if I could show their life from a Mayfly's point of view, instead of seeing them as pests. They have to hatch, find a mate and lay thousands of eggs in just hours.

I have a more detailed storyline but don't want to blog it now...just in case.



I'll post some initial drawings I have made later on...