So with some designs done of different monsters I wanted to explore these more and work on constructign their bodies before finally designing what I wanted for my model ( as well as roughly plan my posing for my model).
Out of these sketches my favourite does have to be the moth man, I think it has the most Tartakovsky inspired style. I did really struggle on the more humanoid characters to achieve the exaggerated proportions like shown on Mavis and Dracula, so something more insect-like will help me to overcome this issue. A lot of my designs read a bit too cutesy that I feel don’t fit into the world I’m aiming for- I may end up changing when it comes to practicing sculpting in Blender but for now I will focus on my Mothman.
Class Time
During this weeks class we were allowed to practice sculpting some more, and I used this time to try and test my moth man and his proportions since I wasn’t too sure if I had pushed it far enough.
Before class started I had already started a rough sculpt on my moth man design, but I was struggling to find out how to then make the body and and just layered clay strips to start to form my chest. Obviously, this didn’t look great since I had to primitive shape base and it came out lumpy.
Then Mike had told us that instead of doing what I did, before sculpting or as you go, you can block out a rough idea of the character and then start to sculpt over top. This made forming my character a lot easier and I could already tell from these blocks that the stylisation and proportioning wasn’t great. I still wanted to work on it for practice and to see what I could improve on or what I needed to research more on. I made sure to have PureRef open with my rough character design so I could make sure I wasn’t making stuff up as I went.
One area I will really need to practice and research is the hands and fingers, I had a lot of issues when trying to sculpt these. Either they would meld together when I remeshed the shapes or they would look just off putting.
Another area I will have to research on is sculpting my fur like texture, this was actually harder than I thought it was going to be. I ended up with a lumpy mass with some dips instead of nice chunky fur. I will also have to look more closely at moths and how their antennae are textured as I will need enough surface area to sculpt in fur here too. For this sculpt I had tried making a plane, circle and spheres and testing how this worked with my antennae, but none of these turned out well, so as you can see I went for some over lapping spheres and just smoothed and sculpted this into a lumpy mess.
Then once the class had ended I had a rough sculpt and a lot to research. Obviously I’m not happy with this sculpt but I was able to learn a lot from this class about my design and what I need to put more practice into for my final sculpt.
I also took this opportunity to ask Mike about how I could improve my 2D design and he gave me some helpful critiques that I hadn’t pushed my proportions far enough into Tartakovski’s style, and looking back at my design after he said that I knew that that’s what made me feel off about my design. I knew I was going to struggle with this playing around with proportions a lot, so it makes sense that I hadn’t stylised it enough and to get a better idea of what my proportions should be looking like I went and looked at the past examples as well as at more references from Hotel Transylvania to supplement my redesigning.
Looking through last years sculpts I found it funny that someone else had a lantern, as I had planned to have some sort of lamp to fit my mothman. Here I some screen shots of sculpts I think will help me with proportioning and stylisation as well as fur and clothing examples that will help me with my redesign.
Redesigns
As mentioned before Mike pointed out to me that my character was lacking personality and a sense of purpose, so I went back and took my mothman and tried to change up the proportions and try to make up a reason or job for my moth man to do while staying at the hotel. I actually had a lot of trouble going through these, my frustration with trying to use Tartakovsky’s designs and a pretty big depressive episode I’m going through ended up with some really rudementary and uninspired designs, but I pushed through as I wanted to get it done. I tried thinking of various ocupations, went back and looked at some of the monsters again to check what I should be aiming for. While here I also tried to put my characters in a pose that brought personality to think of my final staging for the sculpt to. A lot of these designs are bad, and thats ok, however bad I managed to still end up with an occupation and some personality for my final sculpt, and that is to make my mothman a researcher (wearing a sweater vest and cargo shorts or plain pants), who is quite inquistive and throws himself into his research despite being further on in years. I’m planning to pose him with his second set of arms taking notes and his first set fixing his glasses, this might change as I do some final adjustments and practice making this in Blender and while I’m not absolutely happy with this design I can say that it is better than my first.
