Opportunities

So for part of my course it's now compulsory to go to a festival inrelation to what we do. I really like the idea that they're giving us a push to explore and take part in festivals that celebrate game, film and animation ut the problem for me is just money. Most of the big festivals I know of are abroad and I can't afford to do that and I found that looking for something on the same level but within the UK kinda difficult. There is an anual comic convention in Leeds but personally I don't think that it fully meets the brief so to speak. I can see potential in the fact that I can get feedback at the convention and even networking opportunities but I guess i'm craving for more than that. 

So prior to that a friend kindly forwarded the Animex festival in Teeside at the University. I'm really interested in going because I have the feeling the lineup for the game section of the festival will be really good after looking at some of the workshops they have early on. There are people with really good backgrounds from working with companies like Disney, Dreamworks, Pixar, Valve, Spicy Horse anda whole range of other things. Ken Wong who is the art director for Alice Madness Returns is doing a workshop and his work is amazing! There's also some other cool work shops that really be useful like storyboarding and storytelling. 

All in all I really hope I can make it to the Animex Game festival but the tickets are very limited so there's gong to be a huge burst of people buying them at the same time when they're officially released because the festival isn't until next February.

Patterns and Colours

So for my character design I also researched some colours and patterns to help with clothing designs and the general colour scheme for my character. 

I really liked all the different zig-zag patterns and the colours on all of them are beautiful. Because we're going for toony graphics bright bold colours were definitely the key I think and I picked on the the colours which came up most often and put them together to create the colour scheme for the girl. I think using the sandy cream colour as the base of the clothing would work really well to bring out that tribal theme and it also creates a great canvas to add more contrasting colours. 

'Young Bird' Design

So, we're now creating bird characters and came up with an interesting concept. when chicks are born they're essentially naked and we thought we'd put a spin on this and make the younger character more human and as she matured she'd get more bird-like features or 'earn her feathers' so to speak. And with this in mind I started to create my character.

The bird features I decided to give to her were the beak, legs, feet and arms. I did contemplate giving her wings but as she's only a little 'chick' I decided to experiment with clothing to imitate different features instead. The poncho worked well to resemble wings I thought and I also looked at pumpkin pants because they have a nice balloon shape to them. I thought it was a nice way of achieving those feathery pants you see on chickens for example. 

You can see here that I was still considering different outfit designs and  took a lot of inspiration from tribal fashion from old to modern. I also looked at a lot of tribal colour themes and patterns. This one in particular was the one I was really drawn to and I'd like to use it for the final model too. 

As you can probably tell these pictures aren't digital. I decided to use my well loved pro markers to get nice flat colours for my drawings. I used these pens a lot when I'm working on colours for character designs because they're simple and I feel more at home doing traditional drawings rather than digital.

Fashion Influences

Here's a quick mood board I made of the kind of things I really liked when I did a bit of research into everything from tribal clothing to accessories.

The kind of things I wanted to pick out were things that have or look like bird features such as drapes, sleeves, tassels and lots of dangling accessories.

Because of the tribal theme I really like the idea of props especially a mask. All the masks on here are all based on birds but the one that stands out for me is the one in the middle. Such a great use of basic shapes and simple paint designs yet it still clearly resembles a bird with the long beak in the middle.

Wind Waker Inspirations

Being a big Zelda fan the pure mention of a bird tribe made me think of the Rito from Zelda Windwaker and by looking at my character you can tell a lot of her design was inspired by this. I really love the way that they incorporated the use of wings and sleeves which is why I want to experiment with different kinds of clothing that could help resemble some of her features.

The toony style of Windwaker is something I believe we're aiming for as well so I'd also like to explore light, bold colours  together with a simple design. The toon shader effect is also something I'd like to try out for our environment because it might help amplify and enhance that graphic style we're after as a group. I think we'll have to experiment with textures a little but. We have decided we want to hand make all our textures with Photoshop but the level of detail we go into might differ depending on how it turns out.

Back to Basics

To start off with, we started looking at bird people from myth and legends and even the prehistoric times. We mainly looked at Greek sirens, harpies, angels, and one of our peers suggested looking up Tengu. All these subjects are part human and part bird and since that was the direction we were heading especially for the character I've decided to create, this was the best place for us to start.

It's been really useful to see the different shapes and sizes and especially to have a reference for the anatomy. I'm sure little things like this will come in handy for the skeleton while doing the rigging process.

Roots of Inspiration

The games that we looked at were Windwaker, Psychonaughts, Spyro and Rayman. Adam really took a shine to the enemy designs on Rayman 3 and I think there might be some inspired features on his character in relation to this. Even the environment is so full of life and personality in the Rayman games from 2D to 3D. The same applies to the Spyro games. Although I can't say I've played any of the recent games, Spyro has always showcased beautifully colourful worlds and has introduces some great characters from all shapes and sizes. This is another thing I'm sure we'll take into consideration when designing the assets for the environment and for the texturing/colours.

Error. Originality Lost.

For the group project we wanted to contribute where we could however we did still distribute roles between us. For the concept art, me and Adam chose to be in charge of a character each and Daryl had the environment. 

The idea we settled with was for the Stolen theme and we were going for an 'Indiana Jones take the relic' idea. So naturally, we went for a cliché confident and self loving character who is out to impress a girl who he stumbled across in the wilderness. Despite all this, the new 'Jungle Jane' was reluctant to co-operate and was quite a grumpy little thing. Stranded out in the jungle they come across a temple and this is where our animation begins. 

The character I decided to design was the male lead in the story and here he is...

[insert picture here]

After presenting out ideas to our peers, I kept getting lots of comments about my character looking like Flynn Rider from Tangled. After that the more I looked at him the more that frustrated me because I couldn't unsee it and for me, there was a loss of originality. Another comment that was made was about Adam's idea to have bird characters being quite an interesting route to take and we were given some suggestions in terms of research revolving around that idea. After this we went away and thought again about our characters and we all agreed that the humans just didn't have that edge and decided to return to the bird idea because it got a better reception and would be more fun and challenging.

What I've done over the Summer

In honesty, I haven’t really done much productive stuff over the Summer Holidays due to family affairs.

BUT…

After sometime things eventually started to cool off and I managed to squeeze in some doodling time.

This is one of my old— in fact probably my very first OC (original character) called Setrian a.k.a Syon. He is a very handsome young prince who enjoys breaking the rules. He’s very cheeky and has quite the fowl mouth on him for royalty. I haven’t developed his story in quite some years now but, in a nutshell, he lost his parents and the kingdom at a young age and worked as a mercenary for some time before finding a new home at an academy. This academy basically brings together people like himself and opens new doors and opportunities to help start a new chapter in their lives. Since coming to the academy lots of different events took place. He made new friends as well as enemies, he’s fallen in love and is now a father and the list goes on. 

Man this is harder than I thought! But you kinda get the gist of things. Now down to the more technical elements~

My drawing style is quite unrefined and all over the place. I'm still trying to find a style that I'm happy with and reflects ‘me’. I've been out of practice with drawing for quite some time now and college concept art based work is really been a struggle for me because of this. I am still trying to get back into it and hopefully I'll be able to spit out some good work in the future. 

My strengths seem to be pointing to traditional methods from pencil and paper to the use of pro markers and copics. I do have a wacom tablet but I can;t say I've produced any nice pictures with it yet. I also need to explore a little more with different software to find something I'm comfortable with. At the moment Paint tool SAI seems to be my preferred program.

Overall just need to keep at it in order to improve. As they say, practice makes perfect.