After feeling a bit stressed out and mentally low, talking with my group and focussing on the designs really helped me out. We all went and discussed and ironed out the final designs with each other and I am happy to say that I was able to ask my own question and try engage others in voting on elements when we were unsure of coming to a conclusion. I think I’m getting a bit better at working in a group, it’s hard for me to engage with people as easily as others as I am actually learning to control my anxiety which left me agoraphobic to the point where I couldn’t leave my house and now I’m sitting at a table with others artists and engaging with them!
The designs we ended up with were largely based on Joyce’s designs with some tweaks, her design work was really good and her style is simplistic and easy to read so we could all understand what exactly we needed to draw for our own styles. Alyssa and I had brought up about adjusting the humans colour palette to have more blue tones that would compliment the demons orange-red ones, and she did some variations and we all voted for which scheme we liked. With that done I had some other questions about some other design elements like, what size are the wings (since there was some variation throughout the designs)?, what thickness is the tail?, are the Demon’s eyes all-white? and these were quickly discussed so that everyone was on the same page. I’m really happy with where my group ended up, a lot of the earlier work was done my me alone due to others having health issues or mental illness issues and now that I’m facing my own there are plenty of others that I can lean on to help now.
With that in mind I drew out my final character designs on my iPad, line art is something that I need to work on for my art so I’m not pleased with the finished product of it but I can say that this is the Human design and that it is recognisable as the same character that others have in their style. Note that his outfit and colour scheme is very pale and pastel making our character appear innocent. While he himself only has the upside down pentagram on his chest, his bedroom design will hint more at his occult obsession, with this idea of the unexpected. Originally I hadn’t liked him wearing the bunny slippers but they have grown on me to add this femininity to the male whose skinny shorter form contrasts with the demons leaner more traditionally masculine body.
When I first started sketching the final Demon design I really wasn’t liking how it looked, so I finished the sketch and looked at it and picked out what was wrong- I was then conscience of this when doing another sketch to iron it out, this second sketch isn’t perfect but it is a lot better than my first pass of it. Then I went and flipped my second sketch to check to see if it looked good, and it really didn’t, so I went and used the selection tool to pick out and adjust areas or simply redrew them. You can see just by looking at the second and the third sketches how weird my angles and proportions were.
I then went and did some line art and then applied my colour. To contrast the Human design, the eyes are angular and the jaw is more square to have a sense of danger, his body is more lean and square for this powerful presence and the fingers are longer with sharp nails to also create this dangerous and harsh outward appearance. I believe Kris was the one to change the horns from red to this beige white and it looks almost regal when combined with the gold jewellery, and the green gem on the earrings is the same as the humans eyes to link them together. The tail here is how others were drawing it but we mentioned that if others were struggling to differentiate the thin tail from the background we could add some thickness as a stylistic choice. The tattoo was a design brought up by Alyssa and then made by Joyce, who thankfully gave us a close up so we could get the design right and it works really well to bring some more uniqueness to our Demon.
When it came to the casual dress, I kept in mind that these clothes came from the Human, I didn’t want to overcomplicate the design too much but I did add on some Occult designs to Joyce’s patches, I also tried to use other colours to the shoes, but the red colour of them actually ties the Demon to the Human in the same way that the earrings will tie the Human to the Demon. Joyce was really smart with the colour choice here, using nice desaturated blues and some brown pants to separate up the outfit and to highlight the more saturated warm colours of the Demon’s skin.
With these updated designs meant that I remade my reference board to only have what I needed for these particular designs, including Kris and Joyce’s drawings for consistency.
Model Sheets
Then I wanted to put these designs into some model sheets, and I looked at a couple examples from the Living Lines Library and decided to focus on Kim Possible’s sheets in particular. This was because like our animation they have 2 main characters and has them being friends with some romantic implications. So I took a look at the turnarounds, the height chart, expression sheets and expression sheets with two characters and decided to do my own version with my groups characters.
http://livlily.blogspot.com/2010/10/kim-possible-tv-series-2002-2007.html
Here is my height chart of the main characters, I made this by basically bringing in my colour versions and line art versions and sizing them correctly to some lines, made using a grid on the canvas. I then made some notes on these as reminders that basically translates what the height chart tells me.
I did these final designs and height charts using Procreate on my iPad, as this was my most comfortable way to do digital art (a medium that I am fairly new at), but I knew I was planning to use Krita to animated my section of the Animation Jam assignment so I wanted to make my other model sheets using Krita. I had been having some issues with Krita and I’ve been tackling them over that last couple weeks (I’m not able to use my screen tablet and need to use my non-screen tablet, pen pressure not working etc), but I was able to sort of fix one of my issues with a lot of research and troubleshooting forums helping me. This is with trying to get some varying line weight using pressure sensitivity, fixed by making sure pen pressure is on in the toolbar menu, changing the Tablet input API to Windows 8+ and then also customising a quick line art brush, I didn’t take too long doing this but at a later stage I may go back and tweak this more extensively. In this instance I used the fineliner brush and changed the Sharpness graph, the Size:Pressure graph and had the Size:Speed graph on.
When it comes to these turnarounds as well, I only did Azazel’s casual outfit because this is what I will be working on for my section.
Overall this was was quite a fun task to explore my character’s better, and it allowed me to identify certain areas that I can improve on (things like my line art skills and anatomy, etc). I’m going to print my references out and have them at my desk so I can quickly reference things like size and shapes from these.
Group Issues
At this point I was getting a bit frustrated at some members of the group, those who hadn’t been engaging in the chats or in the class. One person in particular hadn’t been looking at any of my work, a lot of which I had done in advance and when she finally did put some content in the chat, it wasn’t exactly in line with what the group was doing or with what I had been posting. I’m fine when it is set as a discussion, but this person was really just dictating what she wanted to do and that was it ( and this was going to cause me to have to do even more work which is stressing me out as I have been working consistently to put out work and not getting any breaks from this). This is something that I will have a discussion with Sarah, the main lecturer for this module as I am very worried that one person could affecting my grade from their lack of interaction with the task.
The other members I am really happy workign with as they engage and we all discuss design tweaks and such in order to achieve our goal together, and I’m really looking forward to see how our final animation will look together.