Character Turnarounds

These are the turnarounds for my three characters. Hopefully it's not even necessary to say whish is which, cause they read clearly :D  But we'll see after tomorrow's lecture with Justin

Storyboard for The Attack of 50ft Alien from Toyland

Nothing much to add here, except hopefully it conveys the sequence of the trailer. Also some changes are taking place as we work on the project.

Dead point

Its been three weeks now and so far I have only a vague idea of how the villain might look like. Its easy with the sidekick, I have few ideas, but the hero.. I had no strong ideas of how the hero could look like so far... These are the developmental drawings I did, however, non seem to offer the solution..  Well, today I'll be concentrating on that more and hopefully some good ideas of shape/structure and just a direction of hero's design will come. This is a collection of some sketches..

Character design: Lecture 3

This lecture was al about the skeleton of the character and the differences in anatomy of male and female characters. The task was to deconstruct the structure of well known characters (here are examples, of Jafar, Hercules, poppey ect.) and then attempt to create a female version of it.

Life Drawing Games

This life drawing wasn't like any other last year. In the first half of the session we played a game where the task was to work on a drawing for a minute and then move 2 easels to the left and work on what you've found there for a minute, till all of as made a full circle. Finally when we came back to our own easels, we had 3 minutes to work on what we found and add something to make the drawing "our own".

  

And we didn't have a model that day  ,so instead Jono, Paul and Godwin kindly posed for us :)

for more of Life drawing by J.J. *Jolanta Jasiulionyte* go here

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The Search for Shapes

This week's asignment was to try and think about our character designs, but only in terms of their shapes. As posted previously, shapes define the feel of the design so this was an atempt to try and capture the right feel for the appropriate design ( vilain's, sidekick's  or hero's) and to pick some of them to develope further.
Again, my words were Monsters ans aliens.
Also, this is the logic I'm following:

                            

  

Character Design Lecture 2 : SHapes in design

 Diskussed By J.J. *Jolanta Jasiulionyte*

The second lecture of character design covered the importance of shapes in design.

Shapes are important in a way it can evoke a particular feeling and perception of the character.

To give few examples,circle is used mostly to create a feeling of security, harmlessness and cuteness. Its only because in our life the shapes that are round have this meaning. For example babies.

Contrary to that triangles are used to create uneasiness and a feeling of danger. Like Justin Wyatt explained, its deep in our subconscious – man is scared of sharp things and understands it as potential threat.

And squares should evoke a feeling of strength, reliability and security. Just like architecture is stable , so can  a design look,  made using lots of firm squarish shapes.

But the true designing begins when one try’s to employ a variety of shapes to convey the personality of the character. A great example Justin Whyet gave us was Obelix’s design.He’s a gentle giant, so the two main shapes used in his design are square for the upper part (firmness) and a circle for the lower part (soft and harmless).

After being  acquainted with shape purpose in design we were given a task to draw few designs using variety of shapes.

To see more examples of  theory application for character designs done by J.J. *Jolanta Jasiulionyte* go here

Thumbnail Storyboards for The Attack of 50ft Alien from Toyland Trailer

Last week our studio Void Canvas was working on the development of the story. Then we (Bob, Ethan, Earl and me) came up with lots of ideas of what shots our trailer could include. As we were talking I tried to capture our thoughts with quick and veeery rough sketches. After these "workouts" (and these were real workouts, try to visualize and think of shots and the scenes, discuss it with the colleagues and draw all at the same time: D ) I would go back to the sketches and colour them ad add all the details and other elements . SO far these act as guidelines of the parameters of the world we're having so far. In near time we'll add some more shots, just not to leave it boring as it would be if the trailer had only that many shots in it.

And these were the original sketches :

Summer Holidays: Sketching out Ideas

There was a solid brake from blog posting, but on the other hand I was busy trying to capture at least some of the ideas I got during my summer holidays, campings and trips . There's clearly a variety of ideas, but after drawing them out of my head I see wich one's still intrigue me and I'd still like to get back to them.


After getting back to Lithuania I met a lot of friends , with those from art school we desided to make a little summer practise like we used to. So this is the panorama from a mound we saw and were drawing.

At the same "summer practice" an element of a ship suggested what is in this drawing.

I discovered othat one of my favourite themes could be ballet. This is not a first time an idea in topic comes.

The idea of a nun-train was inspired while I worked at a UCAS faire. There were plenty of prospective students who we had to advice about the perspectives of studying at UCA. I just couldn't believe of the variety of caracters I saw there :D a group of pupils were ..particularly inspirational :D . But this drawing still.. lacks of the feel and proportions I imagine. But if it were to be developed further , I guess that would be fixed.

Another idea of giant monster formed out of mountain of trees came during a bycicle trip to sanctuary park here in my home country. The sketch captures quite clearly the creature I imagine, but sadly not the mood and environment.

I think this is just a simple abstract, stile practise. Looks more like it served as a meditation :D

The few composition ideas for the birds outter environment.. much development needed clearly :D

This is one of my favourites. The image came just before falling to sleep. But now it looks that it might have been just a flashback of one of my favourite Hayao Miyazaki's films My Neighbour Totoro (Dir. Hayao Miyazaki; 1998). Or maybe not.. Because I visualized a very interesting "Anatomy" of the creature ( for example mouth actually being joint to the .. fur and the skin of the creature).

Next two weeks I'm back at Rocehster to work at summer school. God knows what kind of ideas I'll get after working with 15-16 year olds :D

Life Drawing: Human Figure in Perspective

This session the task was to represent human figure in perspective , again, using all the techniques tought, like using negative space, mesuring proportions with a pencil, visualizing conecting lines to get the direction, blocking in the shapes first and so on. After continuous practising sessions like that get easier ans easier to understand the perspective, as well as life drawing model shapes. 

to see more of  lifedrawing by J.J. *Jolanta Jasiulionyte* go here

A very usefull site for those who are selfteaching  is posemaniacs

 
Also, please consider following my blog, full of creative visuals, CGI and reflective writings on film, animation and art theory.
Cheers!

Life Drawing: Understanding the complexities of perspective

After a litle brake we got a male model in life drawing with different body shapes in reliance to the previous model.
The task after a quick warm up was to capture forms in perspective using methods we learned from previous sessions ( mark making, measuring, relating shapes with negative space etc.)
We were given ruffly about 2 hours to draw it.
First half of that hour was only mark making, there were only strait lines and dots on the sheet, after understanding how the shape worked I began to draw out the values of the body.
Though, as I agree with Chris Hunt, still many issues are evident in the work.
But enjoyed it anyway :)

Sketching

These are some of the sketches. I'm trying to resolve how the slime mold would develop. Concentrating on shapes, also having texturing in mind.


A question, can artists be considered an audience?
Because that's what I'm thinking when I'm doing this project, as if it's for a competition where you are given scientific process and asked to make it graphically/stylistically appealing.

Life Drawing: Working With Charcoal

Storyboard for Lascivious Umbrella

The storyboard is a ruff map of the story as well as of the main actions characters are going to do. I'd guess in near future I'll add more panels braking actions into its details.

Life Drawing : Conecting Body Volumes With the Negative Space

This week the task was to draw switching attention from body volume (shading in other words) to the negative space ( pay attention to everything around the body) trying to make a relevantly abstract drawings. It was a more creative task even though it heavily relied on keen observation.



for more of life drawing by J.J. *Jolanta Jasiulionyte* go here

Also, please consider following my blog, full of creative visuals, CGI and reflective writings on film, animation and art theory. Cheers!

Coat's und Umbrella's Character Design

Animation is going to be about an umbrella who is lascivious over the women rain coat. So I have adjusted character design according to the story.
I've designed a raincoat which doesn't lack of female body shapes. I chose yellow for it is a stereotypical colour of raincoats.

The umbrella itself seemingly has two different designs . The first one is before the moment he sees the raincoat - its modest and quit bland , like Bill Plymton - a notable animator,who created 25 Ways to Stop Smoking points a sensible note of why should characters be designed that way:

"I think characters should be ...really normal; sort of non-discript in his characteristics, because when something weird happens to him, when he's excited.. there is a real contrast. That's the secret of good animation, the movement between something that is sedate to something that is extreme"

The modest version of umbrella has coloured contours, but the shape and the type of it is rather choppy and should remind a ruff and old umbrella for a man.

But than in the story umbrella gets excited after seeing a very sexy raincoat and tries to impress her in a way very similar to how birds try to impress mating partners - by their charming looks and mating dance.

And I suited that by giving some extra patterns and colours to the "ruff-looking" umbrella.
I got the inspiration for patterns and colours after seeing peacocks and bird of paradise mating dances. ( The blue colour I saw in the bird of paradise never left my mind :D )

I still left a question mark about the design of the characters. I might go for simplifying the design, purifying from unnecessary details.

Life drawing

This time we were asked to to take shadows seriously imagining there's a spot light above the model.