29th May 2023

ENVY

Storyboard Draft

During our first meeting we talked about the storyboard and bounced off several ideas off of each other. During this meeting I made thumbnail sketches of the storyboard then sent it Zhimeng who went on to draw the proper storyboard.

Background

As the storyboard and animatic was being worked on I created the layout for the main character’s room. I find it interested that I somehow always end up working on backgrounds in someway despite being a hater. Either way, I drew a 360 of the room, a floor plan layout, and the desk top view to make modelling the room as easy as possible. And also to make it not complicated.

motvational posters part of le background

Texture test for le backgroundooo

le texturessss

Character

Text content

research

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27th May 2023

愛(I)

initial ideas

I built this whole idea based on this one scene I had in my head. The scene was how I wanted the story to end. It would be character A burying a body then character B would appear behind them and instead of freaking out from seeing the dead body, B would wrap their arms around A with a proud look on their face. Which would be the revelation that B is just as toxic and evil as A, and B is the master mind behind everything.

So, with this loose idea I created a moodboard for the character design I wanted as well as one for the environment and colour palette. From there I did some sketches and doodles of the character.

Once I decided the theme I wanted–Playing with Emotions–I made a rough draft of story which was mainly just random ideas and a loose timeline of the events that would happen.

The reason I choose ‘playing with emotions’ was because I wanted to show the negative emotions when it came to love. I wanted to explore the more toxic and codependent part of it, I liked the idea of the couple being infatuated with each other and as a result harm those around them.

Characters

After several colour and outfit combinations I finally reached a design I was happy with. I wrote a short sparksnote summary of the characters’ personality plus how they meet and ended up in this ‘relationship’. And I also did some more doodles of them.

Fun fact about Bali’s name, his full name if Ogbunabali which is the name of traditional Igbo deity of death.

Storyboard

I’ve always had the hardest time drawing storyboards, but compared to all the other storyboards I’ve done in the past, which isn’t a lot, this one is the better of them. Since we only had 45 seconds it was especially difficult to get the main points of the story across without it falling flat. I showed the storyboard to several of my friends, most whom weren’t in animation or have seen storyboards and they all said they understood it so I didn’t need to change anything.

Concept Art

I’m super happy with these concept pieces. It pretty much exactly the visuals I wanted and imagined in my head. The colours were the biggest challenge, but it worked out in the end.

Technique

For the animation I wanted to try out this puppet animation/live 2D technique which I had never done before. I thought this style would really suit the story and since there would be a lot of close ups it would give me the chance to add more details and have this slow very smooth animation. On top of that, this style can also make certain scenes more eerie, especially with the slow blinks and gradual smiling.

Presentation Link

Pitch PPT_ I.pptx

https://artslondon-my.sharepoint.com/:p:/g/personal/shaun_clark_csm_arts_ac_uk/EXc3GyqxN6xCvMJnJCKOcNkBvq8hp45vPrZSkWAQFAVrgw?e=gcjdZQ

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7th March 2023

2ND YEAR WORK

Simulated work experience report

For our simulated work experience project with the 2nd year students, I was paired up with Chris. I drew the backgrounds for the opening scene. We only had two weeks to work on this project, on top of finishing up our own animation tasks and other assignments for the March deadline.

At first, I was given the choice between backgrounds or inbetweening, I went with doing the background because I knew I would be able to do more. The first three shots of the opening scene would take place in the character’s living room, so I was assigned to start with those and since it was only three shots my personal goal was to do all three. Which I was able to accomplish.

To make the workflow easier for myself, I started with the establishing shot—shot three—before the other two, that way I already knew the placement of all the furniture and items within the living room for the other close-up shots.

MOODBOARD

I had quite a bit of creative freedom for the background design, the main thing I was told was that the living room should be cosy, and a balance between rigid and relaxed to reflect the two main character’s opposing personalities. So, I started with searching for inspirations and ideas, and used the concept art and animatic that was provided as a base for the placement of the couches.

SKETCH

Once I had a better idea of my plan, I started with a sketch of the living room. To make it more homely and look as though it is being lived in, I made sure to add random books on the coffee table, mugs, snacks, and a single pillow. (Normally, sofas come with a pair of pillows, I deliberately added just one to add ‘imperfections’)

After each sketch I would send it to Chris for feedback before moving on to line and colour. For this shot, the only feedback I received was shifting the TV to the middle (I didn’t notice it was off centre)

LAYERS

FINAL

When I finished line and colour, he also said to change the lineart colour from black to a dark brown/red. I didn’t add any shading because he said he would do that himself once he decides where he wants the light source to come from, so I stopped after the base colours.

As I worked on the line and colour, I grouped the furniture and walls in different layers to make it easier in post-production in case he wanted to edit the characters behind something or shift things around.

BEFORE

FEEDBACK

FINAL

I went through the most back and forth feedback with this shot, mainly about the perspective of the furnitures. He guided me a lot with this part, and I picked up somethings to look out for when it comes to perspective—it was mostly the table that was throwing me off. Once that was sorted, the rest of process was smooth

FINAL

This was the final background I did. It was the first shot, it would be zooming out, so I made the frame 2520 x 1680 to give space for the zoom. I didn’t receive anything to change for this shot, only a note to make the tv screen size 16:9. I had the most fun working on this background, I think it’s really cute.

Throughout the two weeks everything went smoothly, and we worked well together. I learned a bit about perspective and ways to add life to a space, and the most unexpected thing I learned was how to draw books in the correct perspective—I struggled more than I thought I would with it.

What I would like to improve on for the future other than my perspective, is my speed, I think I could’ve gotten more done. Background artists in the industry draw a lot of backgrounds in just one week. I believe if I didn’t have other work to do, I could’ve gotten one or two more done.

Overall, I really enjoyed working on the backgrounds for this film, especially because I had a lot of creative freedom for the design and colours. Plus, I really liked adding personality and the little details to them.

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24th February 2023

RESEARCH

Personal Work

This wasn’t personal work, it was a task given as part of our storyboard lecture. We were given a short one page script and we had to storyboard it.

I haven’t done a lot of storyboarding in the past, but it’s a skill I would like to improve on because storyboard artist are always in high demand in the industry. Also, having this skillset would mean that I have a good understanding of cinematography, layout and composition, story telling, etc.

On top of that, one of the more common ways to become a director in the industry is to start from being a storyboard artist. I did research on different directors and most of them started with being a storyboard artist. I also reached out to a director named Wip Vernooij–who also studied the MACA course at UAL–and he talked about how he became a director from doing storyboards and, of course, building credibility.

This is a WIP of an art collaboration challenge I’m doing with my friend. I took this as a chance to work on my perspective. I alway run away from foreshortening and perspective, but unfortunately I had to deal with it eventually if I want to improve on my skills.

The challenge is that we both get a word from a random word generator and create a mood board from that word, then switch our mood boards and draw based off of it, plus one rule (her word was sharp and the rule she gave me was to include a wing aspect somewhere)

The perspective isn’t the only thing that’s out of my comfort zone with this piece, I’m also using a different colouring style and it has more details than I’m used to. And I’m also planning to attempt a sort of reflective background, as if he’s lying on water or glass. (Finger’s crossed it goes well rip)

Aside from trying to improve my perspective drawing and anatomy, I’ve also taken an interest in trying to colour and render differently.

This piece was a lighting study where I tried to do a more realistic render and I looked up a bunch of tutorials on colour theory and shading skin. I didn’t just use a dark shade of the base colour, but I paid more attention to trying to use dark reds and purples, and oranges and yellows.

If I were to do another study now that I’ve gained more knowledge, I would make use of blues, and more obvious purples, to add more depth and contrast to it. At the moment it’s a little flat because it’s coloured with all warm tones.

There’s an artist I’ve been following for a while and I really love how she colours. She also does digital art but it looks very much like watercolour (which is my favourite traditional medium) I did a study to learn how she colours because it would fit my art style and I also find it very pretty. From observing her style closely, I’m learning more how to use colours like purple, blue, and pink when shading. Other artist I follow also do the same and I’ve been meaning to advance my colouring in such a way as well.

Whenever I have time I watch cartoons or anime, recently I’ve been watching the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2012 series. I find myself paying attention to the show in a way I never did as a child. I’m paying far more attention to the animation, cinematography, and anime influence. The show is 3D, but there are some comedic moments where they have 2D facial expressions that is very anime style. I’m mostly fascinated by a lot of the shots, the show is about ninjas so there’s a lot of shots that I find very cool and badass. The shot above really caught my interest, especially when paired with the sound of the thunder after the previous shot was silent. So, I attempted to reanimate it using two characters from an anime I really like. I also edited it on top of the audio (unfortunately, I can only upload gifs/images).

I didn’t have a lot of time to work on this, so I only animated the hair blowing in the wind. Which was fine because I did this mainly to figure out the timing for the characters flashing in. Overall, I think I was pretty successful with that (and it’s much cooler with the audio)

I low key really enjoyed doing the facial expression animation because in general I like drawing facial expressions and it’s something I want to improve on as well. I saw a video of someone who animated an anime character changing their facial expression in sync with the music, so I wanted to attempt that as well.

Animating half of a face is harder that I thought it would be. And with my character’s eyebrows being the way they are–round and fat–it’s slightly more difficult to show the emotions. It’s still a WIP, but I think I was able to capture the main emotions I wanted to show.

With this animation I tested out the line boiling effect and the pupils shrinking and dilating to add more emotional intensity. As well as a bit of sfx animation with his eyes transforming colour.

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25th November 2022

2D Digital

Photoshop

I chose the 2D digital pathway because I was really interested in learning all the different softwares that was mention. The only software I had used prior was Photoshop but only a few times to doodle something random, never to animate or do something serious. So in the two weeks that we learned photoshop I learned a lot about the software that I didn’t know about before.

The first task was to look at the paintings of a particular abstract artist, take a shape from one of his works and animate it showing an extreme emotion. The emotion I chose to show was fear, I had the shape jump in panic and cower away in the corner. I animated this with straight ahead because I didn’t know how to do pose to pose using photoshop yet. For the grumpy chair animation, we were shown how to animate with pose to pose–which was to animate each key on a different video layer. It was easier for me to work that way because I could drag the frame to make it however long I wanted instead of having to manually extend it frame by frame. For the final task I animated the shoulders with pose to pose and the face with straight ahead. At that point I got more comfortable with using photoshop’s animate feature so I was able to chose the best and fastest way to get the task done.

Moving forward, I hope to never work on a big protect using photoshop to animate. It’s a drawing software, not an animation software so it’s not comfortable to use at all. Even using it for these small task was a bit of a headache I can’t imagine how stressed I would feel using it to animate a bigger project.

Animate cc

For the next two weeks after learning photoshop we moved on to learning Animate CC. We started off with creating random strokes on the page then with a small brush turned it into a figure. The idea was inspired by Raimund Krumme.

I always struggle with tasks like these, especially when there’s a time limit because I don’t do well under pressure and sometimes I really can’t think of anything to do.

Next we worked on animating the silhouettes. The first one I did was the guy dropping his ice cream and I finished mine fairly quickly so I did another one just for fun. Animating with animate CC was far easier and more bearable that with photoshop. There’s still quite a few functions that I’m not used to but I wouldn’t mind using it for future projects.

Out of all the task we did so far, this one was my favourite. I starting with doing a bird animation loop in place, and a cloud boil loop. And just from those two simple animations I was able to build this scene that showed depth and movement. It was really fun to do and once you know you’re way around the software it’s pretty simple. If I have time, I want to come in and just play around more with the software and try out functions that we hadn’t tried out in class.

This task was for sure my least favourite. I’m not entirely sure why but I just hated it (T-T). Perhaps, I just found animating to the music timing difficult so it stressed me out a lot. This animation has music to it, but I couldn’t figure out how to add it. I was hoping to learn how to use the puppet tool for this task. But I think because we were running out of time it would’ve been too much to go over. The puppet feature, was one of the things I really wanna learn and use in the future.

Blender

The main reason I choose the 2D digital pathway was because the software I wanted to learn the most was the “2D” side of blender. I saw those really cool digital art that was 3D at the same time where the artist could zoom into the picture and move around like it was a 3D space. I was really interested in learning in it, so when I saw we would have a chance to learn that in the 2D class I couldn’t pass up the chance.

I hope we get more than just 2 weeks to cover Blender, I couldn’t really get what was happening in the first class and I struggled to keep up and grasp the functions. So I would really like more than 1 more class after the Christmas break, especially considering how much more complex Blender is compared to Photoshop and Animate CC. I also plan/hope to come in when I find time and practice on my own. I want to create a simple art piece and move around it using the 3D camera function. And hopefully become an expert with the software and make a film using Blender.

After effects

We spent 3 classes on after effect, I missed the first class because I had to travel. However, since I’ve had previous experience (not a lot) with After Effect I was able to catch up in the next two classes. I really like After Effects and I want to become a pro or semi-pro. In general, I quite like editing. This car test we did is kinda hectic in my opinion because I was just trying out everything and adding as much as I could.

character animate

The last class we had was on character animate, personally, I would’ve liked to have more classes on this software and learn more in-depth stuff about it. It seems really cool and I had no idea this software even existed until we had the class. It was really complicated so I struggle to understand it. So, I supposed it’s down to watching youtube videos and self learning lol.

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4th November 2022

ANIMATIONS

Ball Bounce

We started off with a ball bounce exercise. After a short presentation about how the bouncing ball was the ‘foundation of all animation’ we moved on to filming reference videos. We recorded some of our classmates dropping and rolling a basketball, ping-pong ball, bowling ball etc.

(The bowling ball was the most fun to drop because it was super loud.)

This exercise wasn’t particularly difficult, it was very straightforward. However, I did find quite a bit of difficulty with the bowling ball because I struggled a lot with showing the weight– it ended up looking more like a squishy tennis ball. But as i continued on with practice animations i was able to get a better grasp on how to show the weight. (Also, being careful not to add too much squash and stretch, that was a habit a lot of seemed to have picked up.)

Follow Through & Overlapping Action

After the ball bounce exercise, we continued on with follow through and overlapping action. It was still closely related to what we were doing the previous week with the bouncing ball. But now we added a string to the end of the ball and animated the follow through.

First I duplicated a basic bouncing ball three times and then animated the follow through on various lengths of strings. As expected, the longest string was the hardest the animated and it took more ‘thinking’ than the other two. But in the end I was still able to get it. After that, I went on to do the actual assignment which was the character bounce. I chose a bunny because I thought it would be fun to animate the flappy ears–also it’s cute. I didn’t struggle with animating the ears, it was a lot easier than I expected. The only feedback I got regarding the ears was to make the tip of the ears curve out in one frame before going completely flat against the bunny’s face. After such a small change I noticed a significant improvement. I was also advised to add more squash and stretch. The part I struggled the most with was the feet, I spent the most time trying to figure out how to make it look good.

Pull, Push, (lift)

I started off the next task with quick thumbnail sketches of a pull, push, and lift after we had filmed references.

The easiest to grasp was the push, even without a reference I would be able to have a good understanding. The hardest was the lift because the character was directly interacting with another object and I found the poses awkward.

Since I found the push animation the easiest, I started with that. In order to get that shakiness to make it appear like the character’s body is tensing as it pushed, I redrew the same frame. It was a simple technique I picked up from another person and I found it extremely effective. Thanks to that I really like how the animation came out, however, I don’t like the end as much. I first tried switching the legs, then changed it to the character standing up. Neither variation turned out as well as I hoped. But i’m happy with the start. :]

For the pull animation i used the same technique of redrawing the same frame to get the feeling of tension in the character. This character was more boxy and bulky so it took some trial and error to make it move in a way that worked. Compared to the push animation, i’m happier with this one, I like the timing and the movement of the character switching to grab the rope with both hands. As well as the anticipation before it yanks on the rope.

Mood Walk Change

Personally, walk cycles are the absolute bane of my whole existence. Even just the basic walk with the character moving in place took a fair bit of time. Mainly because it took a lot of brain power to figure out how the legs and arms worked. I would stare at it for so long it just looked more and more wrong, but eventually I did manage to it figured out.

For the mood walk change, after the keys were ‘okayed’ by the teachers and they said that the emotions were clear i went on to inbetween them. It took so long so inbetween and I would’ve cleaned it up a little more if I had the time–but I did not. My favourite part of this is when the character runs off and the arms are flailing up in the air. After doing these exercises I can fully understand why animators avoid full body walk cycles and I 100% agree with that decision and I will be doing the same.

Quadruple walk cycle

Unsurprisingly, the four legged walk cycle was more confusing than the two legged one. It’s double the legs, double the confusion. Before we actually started the assignment, we spent the whole class sketching three different dogs that came in. That way we could better understand how the anatomy works and how the dogs walk, run, sit etc. I took a lot of videos to look back on as reference–not only cause the dogs were cute. And having that full day of just sketching really helped when it came time to animate because I barely found myself thinking about how does this leg look like. Instead I was able to fully focus on where the leg should go in the frame.

Animating a run cycle was definitely the easiest to do. It only takes about 5 to 8 frames and since the animal’s movement is bigger, animating the follow through on the ears and tail is way easier too.

Animating the dog took the first 3 hours of class–with a lot of distractions inbetween. I’m really pleased with how the tail and head came out. At first the head was pretty static, but after receiving feedback and fixing it, it flows a lot better with the rest of the movement. Since I finished earlier I went on to try a horse run cycle. It’s harder than it looks. The anatomy of the limbs aren’t drastically different from the dog, but instead of the paws it’s hooves. And I spent quite some time on the movement of the head. For my first time ever animating a horse it’s not too bad in my opinion.

I’ll probably have to animate more animals in the future for projects or just to practice. But at the moment, whether it’s a human or an animal, if possible, I want nothing to do with walk or run cycles.

Body Acting

Out of all the animation tasks we’ve had so far, I struggled the most with this one. Especially the main action of the character ducking down, then falling over. The first animation draft was more stiff and felt more realistic because I closely followed the reference video I filmed for it. I ended up having to redo the ending sequence and added more of an arc to the movement, rather than going straight down, which added more dynamic.

Facial Acting

I enjoyed doing this animation the most. The facial expressions were really fun to do, and it wasn’t too difficult since it was half body. While working on this animation I sort of started to think about and understand my animation style more. I believe my style is leaning more towards a cartoony, sharp and quick movement.

Lip Sync

I couldn’t upload the video for whatever reason but the dialogue is “ni hao, wo de ming zi shi Wang Yixuan. Wo lai zi sichuan. wo xi huan chi la jiao.” Surprisingly, the part I struggled with the most was coming up with a character design–I struggle with drawing real people in a characterised way. With this task I learned that anticipation can be done with more than just the body moving in the opposite direction of the main action, for example blinking, or the eyes moving first and the head following after.

The dialogue in this animation is “Oh! Your graded need Jesus”. The animation itself wasn’t too difficult to do, it went pretty smoothly. The area that was more of a problem was the lip sync itself because in the audio the words use very similar mouth shapes. So, I had to emphasis certain vowels shapes more, to make the lip sync more obvious.

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24th October 2022

Life Drawing

We have life drawing session from 6pm – 9pm every Thursday. They’re divided into 3 periods and I only stay for the first two because I don’t want to be going home alone when it’s that dark. However, I still get a lot out of the 2 hours that I’m there. At the beginning of each session the teacher gives us some tips to help us break down the body and draw with more ease.

From the first session to the second one there was already a clear improvement in the drawings. My approach between them was different, with the first one i started with the head and worked my way down, paying too much attention to make the limbs look detailed. However, with the second session I started with the torso and was more focused on capturing the motion and I cared less about making it look good and realistic.

Here is a 30 sec and 1 min pose sketches I did during the first class. During this session I started with the head, then drew a line of action and drew the rest of the body following the line, and without any more guide. Which resulted in the proportions being a bit off and even with the line of action the drawing feels so stiff.

In the second class, the teacher talked about using two circles or ‘beans’ to start the drawing and from there draw fluid lines for the arms and legs. Just from applying that tip and starting with the two circles for the torso then building the pose from there outward I could see a drastic improvement–which really amazed me. The proportions look way better and the poses don’t look as stiff, but of course there’s still room for improment.

As I continue to go to these life drawing class I can notice that, generally, with each class I’m gradually getting better and more comfortable with drawing the poses. I also noticed that my lines are getting more confident. I’m not drawing as much sketchy lines as before but more fluid, one stroke lines. Poses I used to think were very difficult to draw don’t seem as challenging anymore. Though, I still struggle a lot foreshortening. It’s my main and biggest weakness when it comes to art in general.

The life drawing model today (Nov 17th) was particularly difficult to draw. He did a lot of action and fighting poses. Also a hand full of the poses were laying down, especially the first 30 seconds poses.–laying down poses are the bane of my existence. I was struggling most of the time during this session, but even though almost all the poses were unfinished I’m still happy with how they turned out because I’m still able to easily figure out what the model was doing.

I used to really hate life drawing, mainly because I was very bad at it–bad at drawing in general. And at my previous university I didn’t see any improvement since the first and last class so I would leave each session feeling discouraged. However, now that I can see that I’ve improved and going to these session actually help me get better at drawing I’m enjoying them more than I thought I would. And I’ve gone too almost every session (expect for two because I was sick)

Thanks to the weekly life drawing class I noticed that my understanding of the human anatomy got better, mainly with drawing the legs. I used to struggle with drawing legs but now I don’t struggle with it as much. Of course that depends on the pose, the fanart here is a simpler example. Out of the four I only had a hard time drawing one of the character’s legs. When in the past it would take me ages to draw each one.

Here are some other practice sketches I did outside of class (original idea not mine) I’ve been trying to do more sketches and doodles, rather than constantly doing finished pieces.

Some more life drawings from after the Christmas break. It’s always very cool to look back on my life drawings from just a few months ago and seeing how much I’ve improved. That’s what motivates me to keep going each week, when I’m free, for at least the first hour.

Something new that we started doing during the life drawing session was moving poses.

<—These stress me out a lot because I have to try and get down the basic gesture before the model moves too much, and try to draw the rest from memory. However, compared to the first time we did it, it got a little bit easier with each session… It still be stressing me out though.

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24th October 2022

The Boondocks

For our first proper project we were tasked to make a 10 minutes presentation about an animator or animated film, preferably from our country, or an animation area. Link to presentation here

I volunteered to be one of the first people to present, which was on the 19th of October. I spent a few days researching for any animators or animated films from Nigeria or Africa. Unfortunately none of the ones I found had a lot of information on them, and with me running short on time I decided to give my presentation on The Boondocks. I spent the one week I had left reading articles and journals, watching youtube videos about the show as well as rewatching several episodes as well.

I spent a lot of time researching and preparing for this presentation, but when it was my turn I wasn’t able to share my screen which meant I had to spend the file to Collab. And due to that, the design and fonts were messed up and the videos and gifs I had didn’t play which, of course, made me really sad and frustrated. It felt like all that effort got ruin, but I was told the lack of videos and gifs didn’t take away from the presentation, but it was still disheartening.

Overall, other than the disappointed of the actually presentation, I’m really glad I chose to talk about The Boondocks because I was able to analysis one of my favourite shows in a way I had never done before. I had always appreciated the show on it’s ability to talk about such controversial topics in a humours way, but now I love it even more after thinking about it in a more in-depth way.

Clips & Gifs

Here’s are the clips and gifs I planned on showing as part my presentation but didn’t manage to play.

Starting from 2:00 – 2:23

Starting from 0:00 – 0:15

These gifs were to show the anime influence and inspiration on the show

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23rd October 2022

Character Design

Our first class on character design was on October 19th. I love character design so I was very excited for this class. The teacher talked about some basic information that I had already learned about before but something new I learned was that there is a line between someone that does character concepts, character designs, and character illustrations. As well as the idea of being able to combine the shape. Meaning, a character doesn’t always have to be just a circe, square, or triangle shape, but can be a combination of them.

Our first task was to draw a character on top of these random blobs. It was really fun and interesting to create random characters from our imagination. (I’m a of Kevin in particular) I struggled the most with middle blob, I stared at it for so long and wasn’t able to come up with anything that I really liked. In the end I just scribbled a thicc girl because we were out of time.

During the lesson, the teacher showed us some of her past work, which was very cool, and one of them was a character design for a mascot. She showed us all the variations she made and our task was to take one of the variations she had and expand on that design more. The direction I went for with mine was more elemental. Looking back, I would’ve kept the body size more similar to the original. They gradually got longer.

Above are some character concepts and a character illustration I did in the past. Both original characters of mine.

CHARACTER SHEETS

The first step for this character building assignment was to answer 7 questions about our character that would help us understand them better. I also did some sketches along the side after answering the 7 questions.

My character’s name is Kuro–which means black in Japanese. He’s a creature from the spirit realm who is sent to bring chaos on earth but he’s gentle and lonely soul that just wants a friend. A human friend in particular, but on top of being extremely shy and anxious he has a taste for human blood. Which of course makes his quest for a human friend all the more difficult.

Next we had to draw out some silhouettes of our character. Since I had already did some sketches (which wasnt meant to happen yet, oopsy) I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted Kuro to look, so I kept a similar feel with the silhouette drawings.

After the silhouette drawings, we also had to come up with some different colour variations of out character along with a greyscale version. I really liked the black and white version of his design, but I went with the red colour palette because red gives him a more threatening aura, which would contrast his gentle personality even more.

Once that was done we were to make a character page with the character’s final design, their story, silhouette and colour variations and lastly a breakdown of their shape.

Now that Kuro’s design was finalised, the next exercise was to create a turnaround accompanied by a sheet that broke down a specific aspect of the character. For example, hand, feet, or mouth, etc.

Above is the first turnaround, I didn’t like the way the side profile of his cape looked at all. Below is the updated version after the teacher showed me how to make it look better. Now I’m much happier with it, this version looks a lot better. For the second half of the exercise I decided to do both a hand and feet sheet even though we only had to do one. Kuro’s feet are very simple, like barbie’s feet. I wanted to do a hand sheet as well because it gave me a chance to figure out what his hands would look like since they are hidden under his cape most of the time. I decided to give him short and chubby fingers with sharp nails. I considered trying to give him more monster like hands with three claws and such, but I liked the idea of him always hiding the most human part of him, which would be his hands.

Lastly we worked on a pose and expression sheet. We only had about half an hour of class time to work on it, so these drawings are quite rushed and I plan on redoing them.

For Kuro’s expression, since he doesn’t have a face and just one eye, it’ll rely a lot of his body language and a lot of emphasis on his one eye to show his feelings. Which I was able to start showing in the expression sheet, however, I still want to exaggerate them more. And for his poses, he’ll either be cowering in anxiety or in a fighting pose. He’ll mainly be fighting with kicks and casting spells, rarely using his arms (when he does, it means he’s planing to go all out)

Here’s my upgraded pose and expression sheet. I’m much happier with these ones because I was able to spend more time on them. Surprisingly, I struggled way more on the expression sheets than I expected. Only having a circle for a face, no eyebrows, and big hood made it very hard to clearly show the feelings and drawing Kuro’s face in different angles was a whole other challenge. A lot of the angles looked so awkward when I first sketched it out. I’m pretty sure I used the eraser tool more than the pen tool while drawing these.

Somtochi Favour Onyishi Uncategorised 1