More doodles

Hello all!

I've been caught up doing a few character design jobs at the moment and I've not had anytime to start my new puppet or do any sculpting. I suppose the good thing with character design is that it is something else I can offer, that I enjoy doing, while the world of stop motion is incredibly quiet in the UK at the moment. I'll have to wait to post things from those jobs but in the meantime here is some more personal stuff from the last few weeks.

 Dr Jekyll

Mr Hyde

 

 

Characters drawn from photo reference

Out for a brisk walk

Doodles, doodles everywhere!!

Good day all!

Nothing much to report on right now so here's a bunch of character design work and general doodlyness that I've done over the past couple of months. I'm currently planning a new puppet so hopefully I will have more info on that soon.

 And a super fast sketchy sculpt I did while playing with some new tools

Mohawk Melvin

Just a quick update.

I did this character sculpture last week as a potential give away for my followers on twitter.
I just need to find the time to paint it. Until then, I thought I would do a quick digital paint over to see how I want it to look.

Meet Melvin and his Mohawk

 

And here is the unpainted version as I know a few people like to flick between the two

 

Zombieeeeeeee

The awesome people at Laika house do a creative challenge every month and to celebrate the US release of Paranorman they announced ZOMBAGEDDON!

You have two weeks to create your piece of art to hand in and  the winner is picked by the amount of facebook "Likes"

I didn't win this time but it was a great excuse to make a stop motion zombie puppet

All of the main limbs are sculpted with Super Sculpey Firm, over armature wire. As this was a super quick challenge I had to make a very basic armature. No soldered sections just very strong plumbers putty to hold the limbs together. Then using the same plumbers putty I secured 2 rig points, one on his hip and one on his chest.

And due to this speedy process I didn't get the chance to take proper photos.

I also did the the head at the same time as the body. The whole puppet actually started with the head and the rest of the design flowed from that.

Very basic in design in terms of the armature. I used bandage foam to cover the jaw wires and created a kind of flaky skin texture.

Most of the parts that had bare wire showing were covered up with bandage foam and blended in to the sculpey. So like elbow, wrist, knee and finger joints.

Next up was the paint job. This was one thing I was really looking forward to do as I have never actually fully painted a puppet my self. I've always gotten my dad to do main parts or touch up the bits that went wrong but this time I was quite determined to do it all on my own. Most of it is done with an airbrush then finer details are brush painted.

I did a super quick digital paint over on the head to see the kind of colour scheme I wanted. Im not going to lie, it is very inspired by Paranorman's zombies.

I first had to undercoat it with white then block out the main colours

It took me a little bit of time to get used too the airbrush again as I havent used one in quite a while. Luckily it's like riding a bike :D
After the colour blocking was done I added shading and then finished off with the finer details.
As time was running out (again) I didn't get to take photos except for this one which also shows the armature before padding out.

After the paint job was finished I had to pad out the body and neck ready to be clothed. The clothes were probably the hardest part and were actually done the day before it had to be handed in.
The clothes were a mix of sewing, destroying old clothes and "No Sew Glue"

So that 2 weeks flew by super quick and as soon as I submitted it to the competition I was off on  holiday for a week with the family. 

Here are a few portfolio shots of the puppet.

Also when I got home this morning I was greeted by a super awesome gift from the super awesome Paranorman twitter crew

So very grateful for this, THANK YOU!

The Butler and the Detective

Hello there!! At the moment I have given myself a task to keep me active. I am currently working on my own project where I can concentrate on character design and also take my time with developing the characters. It's a theoretical short film about a Butler who is a criminal master mind and a detective who has spent the last 10 years hunting the butler down. I don't really have much of a story but I have enough to explore the characters. Maybe one day it will be a real short film but at the moment this is not financially or logistically possible for the foreseeable future but at least it is a cool little project to keep me creative.

 So here is a bit of development so far

The Butler

After doing a few more similar designs I decided this was not the look I wanted for this guy.  I did a couple more head drawings and was feeling a bit more happier with the shapes

After doing these I still was not feeling the design so I did another set of heads but this time kept in mind that I want him to look very creepy, smug and snake like... you know... like a criminal mastermind :)

I was happy where these where going so I picked one and then moved on to visualize the whole chap and came up with this

The Detective

I already had an idea of how I wanted this chap to look so it didn't take me too long to find the design I was happy with

This was the first drawing I did and found it wasn't what i wanted.

After a bit more of a play around i came up with my detective

I then added a bit of colour and set a scene

With all of this designing I was getting the itch to sculpt one of these guys. So I picked the detective :)

I did a quick head sculpt to see how the design translates to 3D

Happy with this I decided it is about time that I try making a full body maquette as I have not done this before. Doing character busts has become a bit of a comfort zone habit so now its time to change that.

Here is the armature. I used some hard packing foam to bulk out the stomach and then wrapped it in a kind of rough masking tape to the plasticine something to stick too.

After I blocked out the main shape I found I wasnt really feeling how it looked so I took to photoshop and did a bit of layering with the drawing to see where I was going wrong. I also did a bit of jiggery pokery with the actual drawing to change the pose to be more suited for sculpting

Thankfully this helped me out quite a bit and got back on track

So that's where I have gotten up to with documenting this maquette. I have gotten further with it but I'm going to save the rest of the progress photos for when it finished.

In other news, the series that I did some work experience on at Aardman has been on the TV over the past few weeks which means I have had the pleasure to see the sculptures I did all finished and moving in the episode 'Swimming' from 'Shaun the Sheep Championsheeps'

They dont look like much to excited about but at least I know that they originated from my hands. The original sculptures will have been doctored to how the animator needed to do the shots, so they added arms and glycerine for water (I think)

I managed to take a really crude photo of the TV paused but at least you can see the characters. I have got a photo of the actual sculptures from when I finished them but I don't think I'm allowed to post them so these will have to do :)

I hope all is well with everyone! Until next time!

A Few Chaps

I have now finally finished The Character Design course. The past 8 weeks have been pretty darn amazing. I have learned so much and feel my work has definitely improved although there is still a lot that needs to be done to get me to a place where I'm confident in my drawing. Practice Practice Practice!!!!!!!!

This diagram sums up my work ethic exactly at the moment

 The reason I wanted to do the course in the first place was to help me design better characters which in turn would make more appealing stop motion puppets with designs that I will be happy with. So this is something I am about to start working on. I just need to gather a few new bits and bobs of supplies that I've run out IE. silicone.

Here is all 8 weeks of my assignments from 'Character Design For Animation With Nate Wragg'

Week 1. Shape Language

Week 2. Using Shape Language to create knights/Templar type chappys

Week 3. Character Line Up

Week 4. Focusing on head shapes

Week 5. Story Telling Moment

Week 6.  Matching the styles of Jay Ward and Ronald Searle

Week 7. Animals!!

Week 8. Basic Model Sheets with characters we have already drawn in the course

Well there you have it. 8 weeks worth of work squeezed into one blog post.