Girl Development

Thought I better start looking at characters that are not the mother for a change.  We kinda always figured, from really early on, that the mother and daughter would be the spit of one other, so that when I finally got the mother nailed (weeeeeey), the daughter would be really easy to design.  

We were thinking the kids are maybe about 7-8ish, so I've been trying a couple different designs in an attempt to make her stereotypically childlike.  Proved a lot more difficult than I thought, and I'm actually thinking that her original design makes her look the youngest.  When I tried adding alicebands and bows to her hair it simply made her look older, which's weird.  I am contemplating freckles though... they were about the only think I was really happy with, but they could be an actual nightmare to animate.  We'll see.  Next up, Boy developments.

- Lynne

Mum Debate

Right, I'm really having to get down to actually choosing how the Mum is going to look in this animation, and I have her whittled down to a couple different ideas.  Within our group, however,  I'm getting a lot of differing opinions as to which one everyone likes/dislikes, etc, so I'm going to throw her out there and see what everyone else thinks.

First off, should she be a wee stout sort of woman (very typical household Mum stereotype) or long and slender (based on my actually Mother, who is 5'10 and slim):

Secondly, what's the general consensus on the lack of detail for feet and facial expressions?  The characters, so far, are all noseless, have only pupils for eyes, and walk with stumps for legs.  Does this detract from the characters?  It doesn't sound appealing when you read that sentence, but when they're on the page, I find I quite like the style.  It makes them quite doll-like, which I guess is the direction we kinda wanted to go in the first place.

Lastly, how much detail aught to be put in the face?  Some of the guys prefer her without the definition between her face and her hair, whereas some prefer the line there.  I threw in a half/half one too as a compromise, and it annoyingly also works quite well.  

I tried to do a semi-turnaround of the head for the bottom three pictures but failed miserably.  I managed to turn her head slightly but not her hair at all.  That needs to get worked on.

Anyway, these are your options.  Answers on a postcard please.

- Lynne

Moar Potential Mum Drawings

This be what I've been drawing recently yo!  Drawings of Mum first 'cause we kinda figured that once we got her nailed (WEEEEEY) then the wee girl will just be a smaller version.  We like a couple of things from each Mum so might try to blend them together into one big, super Mum.  Don't really know yet either as to how simplistic I'm going to make the body shapes, if that's what we're doing at all.  This is still all very much working progress.

 
Our favourite so far is the one on the bottom left in the first picture, although we really liked the flare-like legs on the Mum in the top right, but felt that she was too sexy for a mother character.  Might give the wee Boy flares instead and give them all a wee seventies feel.  Dunno, we shall see.  Threw in a wee drawing of the girl as well to see how she looks in this new style.  Really starting to like how it's coming along.

Also been playing around with some heads.  Some silly, some serious.  General consensus here is that we like the oval and square, and the rest simply don't work for one reason or another.  Our top likes and dislikes for the Mum's in the first picture are listed here too.  We'll hopefully get them whittled down by next week for rough storyboards, then finalised for final boards a fortnight after that.

Again, please feel free to fire any comments/crits our way.  Every little helps (to quote Tesco).

- Lynne

Character Inspiration

Been having a wee conundrum with myself and my ability to not be able to draw humanoid figures without making them look human.  That was a weird sentence... but basically we want the characters to have arms, legs, head and body, but not make them look like yer bog standard human.  Make sense?  We kinda agreed that we'd very much like them to look like this:

But, obviously, without blatantly ripping off that idea.  Another very similar character would be No Face from Spirited Away.  So, spent today looking at a Pictoplasma character design book and picked out a whole bunch that I really liked.  

The one on the moodboard we all agreed we liked was the big red guy, top middle.  Gonna try and work out some rough character ideas this week for storyboards, which're also this week.  Also looking at POSSIBLY getting a hold of the uni's multiplane camera for doing our backgrounds, but we'll only find out tomorrow at our production meeting if this is going to be possible.  Hopefully have some feedback on that soon!

- Lynne

Early Character Designs

Amongst all of our meetings, reviews, pitches and deadlines I've been trying to get started on some character designs.  I have two for each of the potential characters, aaaaaand they both look exactly the same.  Go figure.  I'm not even that keen on making them look as human as I have, yet I find it quite difficult to diverge away from that style.  I have been, in recent weeks, attempting to broaden my drawing horizon by mimicking the work of other artists - as suggested by the WONDERFUL Steven Silver - and I'm starting to notice it in my work already, which is wonderful!  I'm still a far cry away from what I'm really looking for though, so I maybe I need to look harder at more diverse work and try and break out of the very humanoid-characterisation area I seem to have settled in.  It's still only week three so we'll see how this develops.

- Lynne