Back on Track

On Monday I had a motivational talk with tutor Phill and now I think I have a solid direction to move in regarding my project Idea.

Aim:
To produce three characters a villain, hero and the heroes sidekick. each character will be carefully designed by first looking and drawing the natural poses of the real animals. Each character will end up having poses, equipment, colour and silhouette sheets. the all characters will be modeled and then rendered with a turn around the hero character will be animated with some walk cycles and poses.

Animal types:
Hero: Weasel
Sidekick: Silverfish/Firebrat or combination
Villain: Stoat

I hope to produce a bulk of useful poses and experiments with characters by next week learning how the characters would move and the proportions.

getting there with the painting stuff

I went through a digital painting toutorial today and found it to be quite usefull below is a silverfish I drew from a few sources above.

Drawing Weasels again

Getting there
I have been drawing a few Stoats/weasels, just generally playing with ideas. I've got a few heads drawn up experimenting with expression, while all of it was just playing about I learnt a lot to assist me in my shape refinement.

Playing
=D just a play around at a scene the proportions still need a tweak but i think the poses work, for the female character I just wanted to get the legs and body looking right without being to flabby or ridged.




Reshape
the weasel designs before these three below had really round mussels so I've had to change that to keep to realism, at the moment i want to keep to a more realistic weasel character, once I've got the realistic shapes down i can simplify them to keep the animals shape without distorting them.



New Shapes
This one is looking more like it keeps the weasel realistic shape and shows some character, as you can see there are more triangles in the basic shapes which I will continue to draw to keep the mussel right. proportions in this one are starting to get there as well I'm going to start experimenting with different rotations on

Drawing Weasels

the character above was drawn really without the guidelines just wanted to do a quick draw of a weasel with the splinter cell night vision goggles on.

I've gone through that character book to pick up as many tips as I can at creating a character from simple shapes, I did however know the basics but there were a few tips that really did help. I've ordered an animal anatomy book to aid me in creating decent proportions so I should be well away creating more when that arrives, at the moment I've had to rely on that character book so here's a few I've done today.

Making Shapes
this one below is a breakdown of a photo just to get the basic shapes out of it so that I could reproduce the same drawing from any angle I think it turned out well the first was drawn with this method and went well and then the guide lines next to it is like an x-ray of how it was constructed.






Practice Poses
below here are just two weird poses I drew just to see if the guidelines work, they seem to work out OK but they still need more work done just to get the shapes just right at all angles.When that book I've ordered arrives I'm going to refine these shapes so that they work perfectly.



Next Task
my next task is to refine the shapes and draw some more dynamic poses.

Creating Characters with personality

My Characters

Right well below are a few weasel characters and development bits I've been working on, some mainly just to get some practice with the body of the character, its one of my weak points. ranging from different styles and clothing I tried to create some nice looking character with a good level of finish.




as you can see from these first 5 drawings I've tried to put the characters in different positions, again this is really just practice. some of the styles stay the same but I have done a few more in different proportions and with different gear as shown below.




This one below witht the hat and monocule is a simplified version of one on the internet, I wanted to try and round it off making it more of a cartoon rather than a realistic looking weasel well apart from the cloths that is.



Next Task
my next task is to continue to produce characters, I'll make some other animal characters other than the weasel and see how they work out.

Rocket Weasel, random weasel game

http://www.freegames14.com/Rocket-Weasel.game1461.html

Changing faces

drawings from yesterday
I wanted to experiment with the face structure since it keeps looking wrong to me, it needs something to make it right, so these are two loads of facces attempting to get the face looking right.


I don't know if I'm quite there yet but these are a start.

Extra
these I found after drawing them faces but are really good for research.. once that book turns up I should beable to get it drawn perfectly.

Tasks.

Tasks:

My task for this project is to create an animated animal type character with and animation. the purpose is to create something more organic with a feeling of life. I first went about trying to think of how I would produce the character I.E. style, time frame, personality and so on let alone what animal I could create. The Initial idea was to create a weasel character but I may change that because the designs i have keep reminding me of Daxtor from the 'Jack and Daxtor series


there are a few other weasel that I can think of the weasels from 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' and the 'I Am Weasel' cartoon so it might be a good idea to create my character in between these styles. combining animals is also a good idea more that I think about it Daxter there is composed of half otter and half weasel so maybe I still could do a weasel shaped character with any other body parts I like.. maybe combined with fox ears and lion tail or something would be interesting.. more development my be done =P.



The Book

The Book 'Creating Characters with Personality' really helped in the development of my base designs, I wasn't looking for anything amazing to draw straight away I just wanted to create some nice looking animal morph characters. It really did help, taking you from a realistic drawing and simplifying it into a friendly cartoon while provide a load of tips and tricks to make it easier to produce and professional looking character ready for cartoons.