Working hard... Full Body Sebastian Maquette and finally some Set Design.

Wahey! We're shaping up nicely now, and cooking with gas! This last week has seen alot of design progress. First and most importantly, I finally got around to drumming out this full body maquette of Sebastian! The cheeky little git :) 

I'm hoping that like me, everybody likes the design and can see the decisions I've made along the way that have shaped his features.

There's still a few tweaks to iron out before bringing him to life in a puppet, for instance, his arms currently are slightly over long and his coat could be lengthened slightly but overall I'm very happy with where he's ended up.

Another decision that some may notice is that Sebastian no longer has his monocle. I just couldn't make it fit with the rest of his facial design as he has very little mass underneath his eye for the monocle to sit on... Just one of those 2d ideas that I couldn't convincingly translate onto the 3d model. 

It's a strong idea however and I might give it another go while I'm making the actual puppet to see if I can save it :)

I'd love to hear from you all about how you like Sebastian's design as he's been a little bugger to work out. Clara happened quite naturally whilst I really had to work hard at Sebastian here....

We've got ourselves the beginning of a set design!

This week I also had just a little time to sketch out my thoughts for set design for 'The Haunts'.  The film takes place in the attic space of an old, beat up victorian mansion and I wanted to find a style and atmosphere that fit well with the characters.

The room is a simple construction, which hopefully will allow me some slack as this will be the first set that I've built by myself. The large circular window hopefully adds some nice shape contrast against the angular and straight lines of the rest of the build, whilst also allowing for some strong lighting decisions and chances for silhouette.

That's all for this week. I'm finally getting a grip on the finer details of the design for the film and in the coming days I'm going to be pinning down all the finer elements of the storytelling and then we'll really be rocking and rolling.


I hope you're enjoying following along, and if you are feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

As always, thanks for dropping by.

Josh.

Ah, Finally!

Heeeeelllooo Ladies and gents! It's been almost a week since my last post and it's been a massive auld slog! If you're in anyway creative, you'll probably at some point go through periods where you just can't get your ideas out in a manner that you're happy with. This leads to massive frustration and head banging on tables because you come to realise the only way to battle this thing is to work through it. The volume of output I've had this week is minimal. The volume of work is huge! I've drawn more than I ever had and all because I just could not get around my ideas with my current skill set.

So what was so challenging?

 For a while now I've been unhappy with Sebastian's design. It needed tweaking but I didn't know how... I knew that I liked some parts of the design and hated others. I felt he was a little bland, had not enough shape and size variation and lacked certainty and consistency. So I set about nailing down his design in a model sheet.

So what's changed?

Like I said, the guy was boring and lacked enough variation in the size relationships between his facial features to keep him interesting, however I didn't want to push things to so far that it become to broad and cartoony.

So I did two things : 

1. Enlarge his eye brows.

2. Shrunk his eyes a little

3. Made a feature of his chin.

These were the decisions that were made. The brain work before the physical drawing began.

The bad, terrible, drawing...

The overly drawn, and complicated... 

The overly simplistic and imprecise...

And the badly modelled and slap dashily inconsistent designs... 

And that's just the face!

When it came to drawing the rest of his character, I had previously been vague and unwanting to work him out. I tried him stooped, broad chested, ploddy, light footed - nothing seemed to work and my drawings suffered a great deal from my inability to draw as well as I would like.

So I turned to Milt Kahl. As I do.

Taking a look at how such a genius drafts man tackled larger, plumper characters and from here I took inspiration for shape variation and indeed, how to draw those shapes. If you're going to steal. Take from the best.

Eventually though, well today... I managed to breakthrough and figure out the design which I had been striving for. I hope you guys like it. Now all I have to do is build him :)

More soon,

Thanks for dropping in.

Josh.

Hey guys, just checking in real quick to show you the traditional stuff that I've been working on in the last few days. I'm itching to animate but currently don't have a camera or puppets to wrestle with so I broke out the paper and pencils to test out some rotation with Sebastian. My drawing isn't amazing but it serves the purpose. I'll have a longer shot for you before the week is out. Hope you like! Cheers for stopping by.