Shipmen Assistant

This is a sketch I had a while back. A little idea  was that in ship-building docks he is key assistant. Carries all the necessary tools, most importantly light. A job, I imagined, wouldn't need much qualification, so much like caretakers, a man could go into his elderly age still working it.

Progress of painting Shipmen Assistant.

Sketchbook Pages, 01 2013

These are some warm-up sketches. Some of them aid to revisit Baltic gods project. I hope to be developing some character designs  to 3D models.

Medeina.

Weave-blower (Bangputys)

Puskaitis

Little Doodles

Little doodles. Funny enough not quick to do this time. Particularly the one with more facial expresion to him.

JJ.

A Test Toy Design Task for Mcdonald's Happy Meal, Monsters inc Theme

Following New Designers show, I was contacted by The Marketing Store, a company delivering marketing campaigns and toys for McDonalds, various films such as Aardman’s ‘The Pirates’ and many other companies. I was invited to attent an iterview with 4 product designers and mechanical engineers. After good three weeks they informed there was a brief task prepared. I had two weeks of time to create several toy designs for McDonald’s Happy Meal following Monsters inc. theme. After a successfull presentation I contacted shortly that day with an offer to join a 6 weeks internship! You can see the presentation here: Monster inc themed toy designs for Mcdonald's Happy meal by JJ Jolanta Jasiulionyte 

 

 

 

Character Demoreel 2012

This demoreel focuses only on design, modeling and texturing sides of character pipeline. Animation specific reel will come later.

Blueprints for Vaiva's Character

The turnarounds of Vaiva show  her construction on couple of levels: her body and dressing. Particularly challenging was the side view of the body, side of head and skirt for it is the profile view which uncovers the ambiguity of shapes in her design: the welcoming round shapes triangulating eventually to suggest her more feisty nature.( front view looks much more piecefull , but the side one sharp and wildly dynamic for example)

Her head drawings is a particularly subtle part, which’s characteristics can be hardly captured on blueprints and work instead as brute guidelines.

Another little upload I wanted to draw attention to was the title design for The Baltic Pixie, which I’ve created from scratch. It is supposed to mimic the feeling of a relatively primitive style of Baltic art.

Next in line , I'd say , are her expression and pose  sheets

Vaiva's Design Detailing : Face, Hands, Legs,

The decision was to move forward with the developed design without working out 'more excitting' ones, because, actually I the already created one is actually one which was needed. Not to go into too much detail, here is Vaivas close up of the Head:

Essentially, her portrait follows a composition of a spiral , starting from the head it goes all the way to the highlight of the pupils. Her facial features are combining both, typical baltic female's features ( bright blue eyes, very defined cheek-bones, pale skin, blond hair) with those of a chicken ( pointy nose/beak, very large pupils and so on). In general I was aiming for a 30 year old women, both inviting and chilling at the same time.

Her hands are more like tools,  for the purpose of coming the flax, therefore, they are bare to the stone-like bones.

Finally, after receiving some spot-on feedback from Phil and Charlotte, I went back to fix the rooster-like feet. Now they're  following the design language of hands.

Over all, I think these improvements and further developments seem precise to the vision and fulfil the needs of Baltic Pixie (Laume) character. Still in development are the turnarounds.

Vaiva's Concept Design

Baltic Pixies general portrayal is for the creatures to be quite sexy and inviting, yet brutal and dangerously animal-like. Their long hair is tangled,  rock-nails sharp, they have massive lips and breasts,  and chicken skin underneath straw-clothing. Some of them are  beautiful, with golden or white dresses, big eyes but nonetheless have the chicken skin and legs. But the queen of their kind, Vaiva, caries  some sophistication to her, mainly in the attire,  worthy of a queen. 

Other motifs include dragonflies and amber. 

Together with the background, which is a complimentary to the dominant character design colour, green, I tried to use full spectrum of color wheel. 

In my personal opinion, the design here is not the mind-cracking one, because this project seems to ask one not: quite familiar female character, with modest moderations to suggest chicken-woman and some fancy decorative costume design. 

I’m  in the between the idea that this is PRECISELY what I needed and can move to some detailed designs of hands, head and so on, or that maybe  should loosen up and give another attempt to get some potentially more interesting designs. 

Vaiva's Costume Design Ideas

 The underlaying references for Vaiva's costum design are chicken and Dragonflies as the animals associated with Baltic Pixies. The aim is to emphasize her curvy shapes, however, she is a dangerous and in a sense villanous creature, so her roundish shapes are complimented with plenty of triangular shapes too.

 The Design should help create a feeling that this chgaracter is sophisticated, as she is a queen. Also, inviting feminity, lush sexiness and swiftness should be evident too.

Idea 1

Idea 2

Idea 3

Idea 4

Initial Voiceover and Design Ideas

Jenny Dunbar is a voiceover artist I am collaborating with for this project. She kindly did 7 different variations of the Baltic Pixie (laume) monologue, of which I chose three so far. However, she encouraged me to get back to her should I see some changes are needed.

And the shortened version of monologue 1 with a background music, taken from Lithuanian composer's A. Sasnauskas album 'Pixie  tales - Forest' ("Laumes Pasakos - Miskas)

Also, I have brainstormed some ideas for the character design:

These are the ones from before, for comparison:

 

So I'm starting to see least one direction her desing can be going for, I'm starting one of Vaiva's Concepts:

On a side note, here is the background sheet I'll use for documenting the Production of The Baltic Pixie:

WW Character Presentation Video

Here is compiled character presentation. I chose to show characters in contrast to each other: how obviously different they are in modeling , texturing approaches, and how the time-lapsed animations also embody that difference. To solve some funny perception issues (they looked like about to sniff each other) I have posed the characters slightly differently and increased the distance between them, Hopefully that does it. As for soundtrack, I Used Dave Keefe's earlier soundscape tests.

Soul Representation Concept

At Wolves Within  discussions lead to development of soul representation concept. This one combines ideas from three other dolls. Also, in Leo's concept I noticed he'd draw it white so I gave it a go and this prooved  to diminish the sinister qualities  "soul " designs  had before, but keeping still the misteriousness.

It was guided, as always, by the reference sheet of native american dolls

Wolves Orthograph Views

I've used orthograph views to resolve the design further and make any changes after discussions with Leo and Justin Wyatt. Also, I should be thanking Justin, Andriana and Dom for their feedback, when I stopped seeing designs objectively.

The bad wolf.

tied with black matter his shield-like body moves lucely, by parts separating and coming together as he moves. When solving his front and side designs, bulky, sharp and mean qualities were kept as he represents Anger, hate, and greed.

The good wolf.

Changes to this one were in legs, referring back to dogs anatomy. It should be expressing that he is peace, hope and serenity.

So, hopefully character fronts are as interesting as the concepts themselves. If these will be 'approved', I'll move to fully resolve them ( back views, 3/4 view for the good wolf, and details) and move to modeling stage.

'The Wolves Within' Development

 Character Fix

Tuesday was a day of feedback on wolf Characters. After discussion with Leo and Phil, I also talked to Justin Wyatt. In short, it was obvious designs needed some problem solving and revisiting.

 For the good one things seemed to go over the top:  decorativeness  and saturated in complimentary colours  were obfuscating the shapes. I've added some mass to his neck and change the 'face make-up' .A little nice touch, suggested by Leo, was to get rid of eye pupils.

In contrast , the bad wolf , presented other set of problems. Mainly regarding shapes of the back  part of the body and how it would work in animation. He was looking stiff as a statue figure. The challange was to figure out how he'd work. So I've come up with this idea, which was kind of evident in the design already, that the bad wolf is tied with an anti-matter/black matter which is holding him in place. So when he moves parts come together and distance away.

I added tail ( finally :D ) and fixed the spine line.

Wolf Terrain Suggestion

I thought to give it a go and create a suggestion of environment to express more clearly what kind of thought I have about it. I find it quite hard to describe it in words.

It is presented in flat view so we see the transitioning from the bad wolf 's affected  environment to the good ones. Also, keeping in mind it is a race from unconscious to conscious , I was imagining the environment would correspondingly  build from 'nothingness' to a fully crowded space.

This concept is also testing the idea for the environment to be quite desaturated in colour. Lighting would be quite colourful: Green (blues, violets) for the bad wolf , golden (whites, oranges) for the good one.

The White and Black Wolves

Last week I have chosen two wolves for each, bad and good one. For the bad one there was a debate, both seemed to have their own strengths.Therefore I tried to compromise the design and came up with this third wolf. I believe it is nicely encompassing ideas of both of the previous wolves.

 

  

 

Friday , we both with Leo have discussed the visual development and approach for character resolution in terms of colour and texture .  So these are close to resolved character designs for both of the wolves .

The dark one was developing quickly and soon I realized it will be quite a challenge to make the good one‘s design as interesting. The idea to make it purely white with only accents of other colours soon proved to be insufficient. Because his also less saturated in shapes in regard to the bad one, so it seemed like he would loose  0:2 if shapes and colour don’t  come across as “complicated” as the bad ones. 

These designs  capture how I’ve imagined them to look like. However at this stage I’m still ready to change/redo designs if our further discussions would ask to do so.

The Selection of 4 Wolf Designs

Discussions of the past 2 weeks have directed development of wolves design to these 4, selected out of.. so far 22 different design ideas for both of the wolves. I hope we could select one of each and I could start concentrating on them two. To solve how they  work together and so on.

Wolves might have 'features' of other animals, for example, a bat. They informed these designs as native Americans have a assigned meanings and signs to almost every common animal. For example, Owl being a bad omen, wolf being a symbol for moral teaching, polar bear being a good omen. It was also very common in their culture to give names of an animal to a person, which he deserved. These reasons lead to considering such other-animal incorporation in to the personalities of two wolves.

 It would be very appreciated if you could express your preferences now.