LipSync Character Design

Our last assignment in DFA was to draw a caricature of our self. We had a couple class sessions where we went through everybody in the class and we all drew each other for ten minutes at a time. Below I have some drawings of my classmates I did

Here are some drawings that my classmates did of me









The next few pages are just some experimentation I did with face shapes before moving on to trying to make it look more like me

For the turnaround, the 3/4ths view had to be in an "attitude" pose, so I did some quick poses before picking the one I liked best

This is the line drawing for my caricature

I did a quick color study for this assignment, I had a tough time deciding if I wanted to go with blonde or dark hair. It's kind of funny, the new teachers I have this year have no idea that I'm actually a blonde :)

I finally decided to go with my new hair because it's more unique with the blonde sections I have, it'll be fun to make later on

Before moving on to doing a fun-on color painting of the 3/4ths drawing, I did a value painting. That's means just shades of gray.








------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is the final with color
(click the picture to enlarge)

I really liked the way this turned out, and when I get free time I want to fix a couple things. I would have gotten an A instead of an A- if I had time to make a few tweaks. Like adding a specular highlight on the eyes, fixing the fingers in the drawing, and working a little more on painting over the lines in the hands. The whole point of the color painting was to see a preview of how it will look in 3D, to see the volume.

The last assignment we have in Concept is to take this caricature we developed in DFA and create a 15 second story animatic. We're going to come up with a story situation, write a script, and then record our voices in the sound room.

THEN... next semester we take our design and our story, and we're going to animate it in our CA class. So come April 2011, you're gonna see me on the big screen :D

Finding Hidden Characters

In my DFA (Drawing for Animators) class we've been spending the last month using different methods in order to create original characters, unique characters. Ultimately, we're supposed to end the project with a design for a character for the Push/Pull assignment, which we will animate in our CA class the rest of the semester.

The first technique that Jon, my DFA teacher, had us do was draw random silhouettes. Just use the tablet and draw them in Adobe Photoshop or Corel Painter, not trying to make any recognizable thing.

After doing that, we had to pick a few of our favorite shapes and do three variations for each using the same silhouette. As you can see from the drawing below, I got some pretty funky-looking things from the same shape.

Then, we pick our two favorite and create a final design. At this point we're allowed to "break" from the silhouette shape if it's needed to make a more appealing character, etc. Here are my final silhouettes:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The second technique we used were to collect photographs, from online and taking some ourselves, of textures. Just anything where we see a design hidden inside. The first image is just a collage of some of the textures I found, the ones on the right being from online and the ones on the left ones I took with my phone.

Then we had to draw over a few of the textures to see any designs we could

We were supposed to then choose two of the designs we came up with to make into final characters, but I didn't really like anything that I came up with so I did a few more extra ones. I came up with these two designs in the end.












------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The final technique we used was to draw doodles, just use the tablet and scribble around.

We basically did the exact same thing as before then, drawing over our doodles.

I only really like my camel so I chose that as one of my two to finalize. The other one I also did extra, like in the textures. Here's what I came up with:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here are my finals all put together :)

The last part of this assignment was to pick one of your final character designs for your Push/Pull character. Since we're going to be animating them, it had to be a biped character, which only really left two of my designs to choose from. I ended up picking both of them ;) I used the body shape from my cat-like character, and put some of the design from the little guy in the bottom left corner on him.

Here's my Push/Pull final character! :D

TADA! And it only took a little over a month...