Overview

On week 6 of the 3D digital literacy module our lecturer gave us the details for our project we would be working on over the semester. For this project I will be making a 3D model of a character design made for the hotel Transylvania world, as well as a prop to go along with the character. For the first week of this project, I was instructed to research the animation director for the Hotel Transylvania movies (HTM), otherwise known as the artist Genndy Tartakovsky. We were advised by the lecturer not to limit our research to only to HTM but to also look at other works Tartakovsky has taken part in such as the Primal TV show, Samurai Jack and Dexter’s laboratory etc. Taking this into consideration I thought of a rough concept I wanted to create for my character then I looked at how Tartakovsky tends to draw canids.

For my idea I wanted to make a kitsune character. First, I started to look at how Tartakovsky tends to draw the head shapes for different canines in his style, I looked at Wayne and Wanda from the HTM to see how he created their head shapes although I knew I wanted to have big ears on the kitsune character I was creating and neither of the werewolves from that movie had large noticeable ears. I then looked at how he drew wolf creatures in his other shows, first looking at the wolf from Samurai jack to see what similarities the creatures had in common with the werewolves from the movie. Looking between the two adaptations of wolves I noticed that the one from Samurai Jack had quite a block looking shape for its muzzle, the front facing view having a square look however Wayne’s snout seemed to come into a point near his nose which I thought would give a better snout shape for a fox themed character. Both these references however had quite small ears whereas I knew I wanted to add larger ears to my character and so I searched through the other programmes he had worked on for any form of canine creature he had created that’s when I asked an online friend if she had any suggestions on reference material I could use, she is that one that showed me the Primal Wild dogs. I searched up more images of these wild dogs and this was the reference I needed for my character’s head shape. The wild dogs I discovered had very diamond shaped heads with a muzzle which seemed very rectangular in shape however if you extended the nose into a slightly more pointed look it gave it the muzzle a parallelogram shape which had the pointed look I wanted for my character. When I showed my lecturer the research I had conducted into his style, he reminded me that Tartakovsky often based his designs around the personality of the character and therefore he suggested that I should experiment with creating foxes with all sorts of tell-tale signs of personality, such as a thin fox, fat fox, excitable fox, childish fox etc and so I got straight to it. At first, I tried out drawing foxes of different body shapes such as a strong fox which was quite buff, a thin fox which was nerdy, a fat fox which was lazy and even a small fox which was mischievous. My eye kept getting drawn back to the roundness of the lazy fat fox and so I explored with a grandad theme with it which instantly drew me into the design.