Laika Creative Challenge... again

In between doing a few freelance doodle jobs I decided to attempt Laika's Monthly creative challenge with another stop motion puppet. The trouble was I only had a week to do it.  I do like a challenge especially a tight deadline :)

The challenge was to create a character that is missing from Paranorman and why they weren't in the in movie.
I created the character Ralph.

"This is Ralph. He works at 'Lost Barks Animal Rescue.
He has been missing since he accidentally ran over a dog (Bub) a couple of weeks ago. It is feared that he has been run out of the city by the Blithe Hollow stray canines"

If you haven't seen Paranorman then this video will introduce you to Bub

 Voting

If you would like to vote for me and you have a Facebook account please go to this link and 'Like" the picture. I would be most grateful. Also be sure to check out the entries as they are fantastic!

MY ENTRY

Voting ends Friday 28th September

 

Making Ralph

Me being the geek that I am, I tried my best to make it look like it could fit right in with other background characters from the movie.

I did a quick doodle of what I had in my head just so I had something to loosely work with.

Once again in my manic work load I didn't get the chance to take photos of every step I took. Mainly the armature build. I just made a very basic wire armature with a rigging point in the chest and the hips. Then I bulked out the body with cushion foam. I always find cutting this foam to be quite relaxing.  This is where the shape of the puppet started to change from the drawing. Not too much though.

Due to my current living situation I knew that I'm not going to get to animate this guy any time soon so I opted to give him a hard sculpted head and hands.  I also wanted to give him a prop which would be a dog catching pole.

Next up was painting the sculpted parts. I did this with a mix of airbrush and brush painting.

But before I started I did a quick digital paint of how I might want the head to look.

After doing this I watched one of the Paranorman trailers a few times and compared it to one of the characters that I have a fondness for. I decided I would just try to get it as close as I could to this guy.

Stages of painting

The finished head

The clothes really gave me so much trouble so I had to get help with those. I did try really hard but it was taking far too long and I was running out of time. Thanks Mum!!! :)

With the clothes done very swiftly, he was done! 

Here is a few more photos of the finished fella

Until next time!! 

P.s  Go and watch Paranorman!!

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!