I created an animation using my flipbook scans using aftereffects and you can see it here!

Finished Character

Here I have my character in a range of different poses. Enjoy!

Here I have a few more sketches I did to decide what he's going to look like.

This is one of my first sketches of my Character, along with a few possible weapons etc.

Inspiration

When thinking of my character I try to look for inspiration for it everywhere. This time I actually found it whilst watching a documentary. It was about the rainforest and I thought, why not create a rainforest protector, after all this is what it needs. So at this point I actually researched poisonous plants that you find in the rainforest because i thought this is a way of plants fighting for survival and it fits in perfectly. Some kill you instantly, some damage you if you touch a certain part of it, some make you go blind, there is many many ways in which they do damage which gives my character a range of possible ways attack and defend itself. Also it sets a beautiful environment for my character to be in. That's why I decided to go with this idea. So I started sketching and this is what I ended up with:



It's a mixture of the plants that I looked at; strychnine tree, stinging tree, cowhage, curare, caladium, bead vine, castor bean etc. Not necessary in looks, but also in what they can do

Animation - research

Lifted - a short Pixar animation directed by Gary Rydstrom

I came across many many of Pixar's short animations, usually you see them before movies etc and to be honest, it's impossible not to love them! This one I can actually associate myself with because I have yet to pass my "driving test" which is technically it but a ufo version. So this makes it really funny because I know that this is what the test is going to look like, stressful to me, very stressful... yet if someone was there looking at me they'd find me and my actions amusing. Obviously because it's a very professional animation there is not a single bad word i can say about the way it looks, because it's perfect!

Animation - research

Flipbook animation - lgviewty on youtube

This is an animation I came across while looking at flipbook animations which is what I'm about to do. The first thing I notice is the length of that animation it's over a minute, then I realise how many pages he must've drawn to make this. I do see it's paid off because the animation came out really well, mostly because of the quality of the drawings, it's really neat... maybe even too neat, I suppose what he might've done is do it digitally and print it out. Other than that I love the way hes drawn the explosions, movement etc. I think it looks very realistic.

Animation - research

A brief History Of Pretty Much Everything - James Francis Bell

This is another flipbook animation I came across. Amazingly long, over 3 minutes! When you read the description he says that it's roughly about 2100 pages long and took about 50 jotter books! He says it's his final piece for his AS art course and took him about 3 weeks to finish. It's a very simple animation not much detail in it I could compare it to a children's drawings but I think that's the point of it, it's the design of it and if it was a very good quality drawings it wouldn't have the same messy feel to it.

Animation - research

Kiwi By Dony Permedi

This is another one of my favourite animations, done by a student. Compared to other ones this isn't looking as professional as them yet, it's amazing. I believe it's because of what is actually going on, here we go back to - it's not only what it looks like, it's also what it means, there are a lot of emotions going through it, it's happy, funny, sad etc. and all that makes it a brilliant piece.

Animation - research

Octopus cartoon

This is one of my favourite animations of all time. I love it because it's got so many emotions running through it, it's funny, cute, it's got those "unsure if they're gonna make it" moments etc. I suppose overall it's just not boring! I love how you can read all the emotions through their face expressions and it's not only brief things, you can almost feel what they feel. The animation is so intense once you start watching it you cannot just stop and walk away you have to finish watching it and see what happens! It just shows that not only a good quality image is what matters, it's also a storyline.

Character Design - research

The first character reminds me of a mixture of rock and lava. The size of it and the fire within makes it look like a very dangerous thing simply because it doesn't look like a thing that could get damaged easily. The lava to me looks like human human blood, the placement of it looks like that is what's running through his veins. From the look of it you can imagine the temperature of it, you look at it and immediately know you don't want to be near it. The artist exaggerated the size of his arms, legs and his hands to show his strength.

The second character also seems to be made out of rock and lava. This artist on the other hand presented his strengths in a different way. He used many spikes all over his body which immediately make you think of danger and his power must be some sort of fireball throw because both of his hands are on fire.

I put those two together just to see what difference little things make and how, in different ways you can present similar things.

Character design - research

The first thing I notice and I have to talk about are the horns, they're massive and it makes them seem very dangerous. Their colour makes me think they're like metal, solid and unbreakable and if used well can deal a great amount of damage. When I look at the rest of the character I don't think they're there for attack, it looks to me like they're used for self defence more than anything else.
The other thing I must comment on is the detail that goes into this piece. I can see all those different brush strokes on the fur and you can see how much work it required... and to be honest it paid off because it delivered such an amazing piece.

Character Design- research

This is a piece by Lucas Graciano. At first it looks pretty simple, it's an animal... but when you look closer you'll notice little branches and bark instead of skin and fur. It's those little things that change a usual looking thing into something exciting! The things that make this creature really scary is the size of the claws, sharp teeth (which are on show, just like when animals are trying to scare someone off) and the horns. The colours used on the character are dark, which create a great contrast for the teeth which draws your eyes to them.

Character Design - research

I was recently looking at the work of Michael Kutche, a German artist whos work we can see in things like "Thor" and "Alice In Wonderland". I looked at quite a few and i've noticed that he doesnt stick to one style, the looks of his work vary from really detailed 3D looking creatures to soft brush characters.

On this image we see a Woola concept, it's a lizard-like dog. When you read the description, the "lizard like dog" it sounds wrong because dogs are usually associated with these friendly looking fluffy animals but when you try and imagine a lizard, it doesn't put such a nice image in your head. But i must say that Michael did make it look really friendly, simply because he made it really fat and wrinkly which makes it look like a really lazy, barely moving thing... Also with it having a really friendly looking, smiling face, it's hard to look at it and not smile back! He used very soft colours to again to make it look more friendly. On it's back we can see some sort of spikes, but it'a not scary or intimidating when I look at it I think that maybe this is it's kind of fur. 

Character Design - research

When looking for inspiration for my own character I looked at all forms of characters already out there. Starting with humans through animals all the way to abstract characters.

This is one of the first images I found. I like it because of the mystery within; the character's body is invisible, which makes it this way. It's the jagged edges on the armor and the shapes of the helmet which gives it a scary, aggressive and dangerous features. It's usually the characteristics you give an enemy. I think another great thing about this piece is that it's a human character, yet they made it look really interesting by making just the armor speak for it, just like face expressions speak. I suppose the bad thing about it would be that it can only express one feeling and it's anger. Dark colours used within also help to enhance the scary look.

Illustrator Induction

We've had an illustrator induction where we got taught how to use the software. The teacher presented us with many techniques to create things in illustrator as well as many many handy tips like; it's best to create your animations in illustrator because it's easier to edit the shapes without (like in Photoshop) having to start from scratch over and over again. We then had to either use the character we've designed or quickly sketch something up to work with. I decided to create something simple to work with just to make it easier for myself since I wasn't familiar with illustrator.  So i made a quick sketch in my sketchbook and scanned it in to work with.

This is what I created in the end! It's just a little cactus, I know it's not realistic looking or even a little 3D but I'm still not that amazing with using illustrator.I created him using mostly the pen tool and basic shapes, then filled him with some colours. I must say at first it was pretty hard to do it, but once I understood how it works it became quite easy.

Photoshop Induction

This is a photoshop Induction session we've recently had.
During that session we got showed a lot of ways in which to use Photoshop and at the end we had to create a collage out of the photographs we've taken during our trips to the museums. I must blame the quality of my end pieces on the light which we didn't have during the day, it was raining so there was barely any light coming through the windows, and in the museums not only it was pretty dark but also we weren't allowed to use the flash. Everything seemed to come out blurry and so I tried to pick the things that weren't as bad as the rest. This is what I came up with.

One of the images is a character, it's actually a very creepy doll I used that and to make her more creepy i put a dagger in one of her hands and a poison in the other. The poison flask was actually a gun powder flask so I made it a bit smaller to fit in her hand. I enhanced the colours on her so she isn't as pale as she was. Also I've increased the contrast to create more shadows etc. just so it looks less different from each other.
The other image is actually a castle image, not taken by me, I got it off the web just because I couldn't work with the blurry images. Instead of creating two characters I thought I'd create the environment for the creepy doll. I've increased contrasts again and made the castle a lot darker. Then i simply took an image of the sky and made that nearly black to enhance the horrifying look.

In the end we had to save both images in 2 ways, one as 72dpi, RGB suitable for screen view, and another as 300dpi, CMYK suitable for print.