Male Gnome finished

At the beginning of this project, I thought that I was going to love this character, but with any hero type character I have had problems with him. He has always come close but never truly there, I know what he will look like but I have wanted to draw him that way before I modeled him. 

These are my beginning designs for the day.

 The last page was my more successful page.



The expression sheets helped me so much when doing the female gnome so I thought I would just jump to it for the male gnome, and once again, it became a lot more enjoyable.

These expressions are really working for me - I think they show his character nicely.

Once again I finished on the colour experiments but I did not go into too much detail - my favourites are 1,2,7 and 10

Expression sheet and Turnaround

Fish update

I have been keeping myself busy by drawing some more images of the fish, I was keeping in mind the characteristics of the fish but trying to stay fresh at the same time. This allowed me to come up with some different styles and proportions - I have been enjoying my time with this fish so far.

I experimented with different scales - larger belly, large fins, larger eye - just so that I can experiment every possibility.

I drew some more images and tried working in some colour experiments

After a lot of experimentation, I came to the conclusion that the character just has to be black or possibly a ver park purple or blue.

I am now really happy with this character, the next job is to do expression sheets and turnarounds and then move on, there is plenty to do, and it is about time i did some designs for the pond. I pretty much know what it will look like because some of the design work was done in the animatic but I would like to focus in on some areas like the water feature and the plant life.

Summary of the Day - 19th February

Today has been a very good day for me, I have sorted out some problems and I now have an insite into the look of my characters. I think I have been wuite productive today, and I hope it continues - I'm getting really excited for my animation, ideas are constantly popping in my head - I have some ideas on how to change my animatic for the better which hopefully makes the animation clearer in the end.

Female Gnome Design 01

My initial thought with the female character was to have a long blonde haired beautiful gnome, but after drawing the beginning ideas for the male - that idea for the female no longer made sense. So I have gone for an elderly lady gnome, which fits a lot better and I hope it will be cuter in the end. I am far from finished with this characters design, but i liked this as a base - Bo has mentioned that she isn't cute enough and that the hat makes her look like a witch - which I must say, I agree with.

Gnome designs 03

This design is a bit more pleasing to me - it is more stylised and charming. However it still doesn't tick all my boxes because I don't think this will be easily animatable. But I like my progress - I am going to look at some new character design books and hopefully they can help me.

Gnome Designs 02

These designs are now getting better, I really like these, I'm gonna work on them a bit more and hopefully get a more refined design.

Gnome designs 01

I found it difficult to draw a good gnome in my sketchbook because all the line work was restricting me from creating something bold and new. So here I have gone into photoshop and obtained a large brush and just got painting without focusing on line work. I quite like these orginal sketches but I can definitely push so much harder!

Creature update

So its been a entire week since I last did anything on the cockroach because my dissertation has taken over and I have really missed it! I'm itching to get past this designing stage now and get a move on to the modelling - I think the design process is almost finished - I have the main frame and shape I just need to sort the face. The colour and detail will come when I have a chance to experiment with it.

So today I have been working on the head, but this time I made sure the body was in the image too so that I can work out how the head would move with the body.

So I had this idea that the mouth would open in four ways, almost like the vampire hybrids in Blade 2, however I didn't see this working - So I had a talk with Alan

He readvised me to keep the curved shapes so that the creature didnt seem rigid - he also advised that sort of simplify the mouth and have one that doesn't open that much. He suggested that I do this beak looking thing that will almost open like the first image. The side one shows the design better I think.

This is a quick outline to show the shape a little better - unfortuantly my painting skills hide the detail.

I thought that the beak thing wasn't really working but the shape wasn't far off - I remembered that I wanted this thing to be really scary!!! so I added massive fang like teeth - I then realised that the this structure in the mouth could stop it from closing his mouth completely and that will lead to dribbling (Which is always cool and disgusting on a creature and what I wanted.)

I then added a couple more pinsers at the bottom of the mouth, and for three reasons - 1. the creature would need them to put the food in it's mouth - 2. the underside of this creature is doesn't have a look on it. - 3. It looks AWESOME!!!

I think I am nearly there, I'm very happy with where I am, my next task is get this in painted form - then colour tests and then I may start painting him in the different scenes because I need to know what he is going to look like from any angle and I need to start looking at location shots for the final image.

Overall study painting

 

 

Here is a quick painting of the overall thoughts with the creature - The head is still a little wrong yet I'm kinda like it, I also added a shell like structure to the base of it for protection against humans.

 

I have finally remembered to put the human silhouette in so that I can judge the height difference.

 

New Head alterations

I'm a little worried about the head at the moment becuase these are looking awful! There is a lot wrong with it, but rather than stating everything that needs fixing, I'm just going to go and sort it out!!

 

Number 5 revised

I wanted to do some extra work on the number 5 head because although I really like the shell, I'm not too confident on the face.  So, I'm starting really like the face on the new on now - I like the contours and the extra pinsers that help the bug look.

- My only problem so far is that it is really far from an original cockroach head. That may be a problem or an improvement but I would like to do more designs to polish off any problem I have. I have reallised that the new shell design I have on this head will add some interesting details to the body because the multiple shell must continue throughout.

Number 5 open mouth and side profile

More Head Designs

Head concepts

Here are some of the head designs that I have been doing for the last couple of hours, I believe that this is going great so far, I'm really happy with how they all look. I did start by using fully black silhouettes with a 100% opacity brush but it looked to boring for me to work with. So I cut the brush down to 40% and worked with that - this allowed me to work with the shapes, textures, and light balance that the brush created. Some are a little far from cockroach's original face, however they really work as evil looking killing bugs!

Page one

Page two

Wooooo it's working!!!

This is starting to really work now, I get a real feel that the legs are holding weight and that they are also jointed the right way.

As you can see I have also drawn the creature in the crouched down position which will be used when the creature is going through tight spaces.

Work Update - Sorting out the shape

On my tutorial with Alan, he told me to sort out the base line of the body. I will have to scan in and post up the drawings I have done over the weekend to compare with these. But for me this drawing is working better than the those ones. The drawings I have done over the weekend makes the creature bend the other way, however the problem with this is that the creature looks to circular and somewhat cute.

What I wanted to created via with new bend in the creature is a more creepy and scary structure.

Deadly Designs 01

 

 

My first thought was to start with some designs that had the characteristic of being but as I was sketching I realized that the design were become more of a deadly nature. It doesn't really matter that I went down this root instead of the Strong root because either way the creature has to be deadly. What has made these creatures look deadly is the sharp edges, so for the strong designs, I will be looking to sketch at more square like silhouettes.

As you can see from the designs, I have gone into slight detail - Some would say this was too early, but I was really itching to so what they would look like and what I could create. I really like these designs and I think that they could both belong in the movie together with two different roles to play.

Post nuclear war scene

 I painted my interpretation of the post nuclear mutated alien cockroach invested war zone,  just to get myself in the mind set of the location.

Slash Designs

I've picked Slash as the character for the ident because his look is very iconic. I want to keep a simplified look for the design but keep his iconic look. I have found a coupl eof images online of Slash and then turned them into toonic designs.

Slash's hair and hat is where his iconic look is strongest so I want to consentrate on keeping that look, the rest is not as important.

Default Sheet - I started with a guide size of seven and a half heads in length.

Slash Design one - I like the t-shirt in this image

Slash design three - In this image I liked the jacket and wanted to see what it was like with the t-shirt from above. I think this is quite a nice one. 

Three head Default Sheet

This one was to what it would look like with a stylised version. It okay however it is not good enough for what I need.