Week one work
Class work~
Warm-up excersises~
We began the first class by doing multiple warm-up exercise in relation to lines, this ranged from drawing straight lines, to circles and S-shaped lines. We followed up this exercise by creating 3D shapes and adding contour lines. These exercises aided in both loosening up our lines to achieve more natural, confident and flowing sketches and to think of shapes as 3D objects, using the contour lines to create forms.
Creating characters out of basic shapes~
In the second exercise we utilised the ideas and techniques from the first exercise to combine forms and shapes to create unique and visually interesting characters. I enjoyed this exercise as it gave me a chance to be creative, and I was able to use one of these designs in the following homework.
Group Work~
Our group worked well together and managed to come up with 100 ideas, from these 100 ideas we narrowed it down to our five favourites, originally we planned to combine these 5 as deciding on one single world was proving to be quite difficult however as we worked on the world and discussed the story we realised the 5 ideas were very different and was beginning to overcomplicate the world, we foresaw that this could cause complications with the story and how we’d implement all these world elements into it. Furthermore we were very conscious of the limited time of the animation which also contributed to our decision to remove another 2 ideas, those being contracts with spirits and a game simulation, we chose to remove these as we wanted the rat world to be the main focus, and we already had a few ideas to combine it with skeleton and sweet world.
Our final idea is a normal, gloomy looking New York style world that transforms into a world made of sweets after the main character eats a magical sweet. A rat becomes the main characters guide throughout the story and leads her to a rat empire hidden in the underground of the city.
Discord messages~
(Toyis=Me)
Homework~
For the week one homework I chose to trace the character ‘Wasabi’ from Big Hero Six and find his construction line, I referenced the characters ‘Ursula’ from the little mermaid and used a basic design I created in class during the ‘creating characters out of basic shapes’ exercise and developed it into a full character using simple shapes then added the construction lines.
I chose Wasabi because his shape language was immediately clear to me, and I wanted to focus on characters with clear or exaggerated shapes. Although his form is very clearly square, unlike the other characters I chose/made his body is still somewhat realistic, which also contributed to my choosing him as my first example.
I then chose Ursula, as I knew Disney characters all have very recognizable shapes. I specifically chose her because her form is the complete opposite of Wasabi, therefore giving me a chance to practice different forms and create construction lines for them, which I needed for my final character.
The final character was a character I created. I got the design idea from an earlier exercise. I went through all the designs I made and chose which one had the most personality and interesting form. To create the body, I followed the same formula I did for the head to keep everything consistent: a large followed by a small circle, which creates a pear-like shape. I flipped the shape to balance the body and head (therefore having the large circle act as the hips) and gave him large circular shoes to keep the shape language consistent. The final element I added was a skateboard. Originally, he was holding it, but I thought this broke up the character’s shape too much and was distracting. After a couple iterations of the design, I chose to have him leaning on it and have the skateboard be a very sharp rectangular shape. I chose to do this because I believe it adds to the characterization and adds interest to the design, but by having the board at the bottom of the design, it does not take away from the main focus.
