Character lesson week 6 and 7

Week 6 was all about how powerful silhouettes are when working with characters. The silhouettes can help an artist determine how to create a character, if the character is working and where to improve a character. If a character's silhouette needs to be recognised as that character otherwise something isn't working.

For this weeks task I was asked to design monkey characters. I started to think about what these characters could be like. Where they warriors? Smart? Royal? Or were they plain old monkeys.

Heres what I came up with...

My first designs represent warrior monkeys. The top image is a strong warrior that will get a job done. In the second image I was trying to show a monkey stance with the bent knees and hunchness.

For this design I tried to get a royal and fat king that just lays around barking orders.

These last two images I wanted to stylise the monkey by simplifying the features and making the ears bigger.

My final task was to create a zombie character, I wanted to create two zombies, one normal human zombie and one monkey zombie. However I spent too much time on the one human zombie because I was having a lot of fun whilst doing it, anyway this is it.

Week 7 was a lesson I was really looking forward to, it involved making monsters and creatures. This lesson would be extremely useful for my sidekick and the alien side of the other characters. Well this week my task was ask to create the wildlife that would exist on a gaseous planet.

Before starting the designs I wanted to think about what kind of earth creatures would live in conditions like a gaseous planet. I first thought that there wouldn't be land; which means no vegetation, which means no herbivores and every animal would be a carnivore. Having no land would also mean that legs wouldn't be necessary. Justin told the class before drawing happened that the carnivores have evolved with weapons on the body to cause injury or death to there prey and herbivores have evolved to be armored or skilled in evading just so they have a chance in getting away. However my planet has no herbivores which mean each animal would have a offensive weapon and a defencive skill.

The animals I started to look at was aquatic animals because although the pressure of water, it's the closest reference I have to look at. Something else to look at was birds. I looked at fish and jellyfish and octopuses to get the following.

This designs are heavily inspired by jellyfish, the top left drawing is my favourite, the holes on its belly allow the animal to blow short burst of air out and float in the planets conditions. These holes also have long, thin, sticky fibres drooping from them, these allow the animal to catch small prey that flow into its path

This design has been inspired by a jellyfish and swordfish. It is heavily equiped with a super sharp sword like blade on the front of the face that wiill impail any weak spot on its prey. The rib cage will expand widely to allow the lungs to fill up to the maximum volume, the rib cage will be then contract quickly, releasing the air in the lungs out of two wholes in the back to allow short bursts of speed. These two equipments allows the creature to quickly burst and slice right through its prey. After development the creature now has a horizontal jaw that chews through its prey as the animal goes through. 

A competitive predator is this animal, an armored, club equiped piranha.