He's So Fluffy

Haven't been able to stop drawing this guy since I came up with him! Might be because I have a bit of a fondness for top-heavy characters - I tend to find them more fun to draw.

A Strange Train Of Thought

So today during my screenwriting class I was doodling as always (it helps me concentrate, honest!) and drew some weird little… bug-like thing that I made up off the top of my head. Then I noticed it sort of looked like a guy wearing the head of some sort of bird thing as a helmet or something. That then prompted me to draw a few more pictures of it, then start to give it a body…



And then when I got home... this happened.



And then subsequently, this. I'm not sure what it is, where it's from, what its name is or how and why I even came up with it in the first place, but I kind of like how it looks. I might just be drawing this guy again in the future. :P

I Hope You Weren't Planning On Doing Something Today...

Another drawing of my "bad side" character. Her design is pretty much finalised now (although I might need to make a few tweaks here and there to make her easier to animate), but I'm still a bit iffy about her colour scheme, so that will possibly change at some point.

Come To The Dark Side

Been a while yet again since my last update! Still, I'm back at uni now, so my posts will most likely get more frequent as I get further into my course.

The biggest change that's occured since my last update is the fact that I am now in possession of a tablet, which has made digital art much easier to do - shading and whatnot used to be a very awkward process (especially when I had to shade large areas) since I had to use my laptop's trackpad to do it all. It's also nice to be able to just draw straight into the computer without having to faff about with scanning and adjusting levels in Photoshop and erasing lines that didn't quite get rubbed out properly while I was sketching and all that.

Anyway, part of our course this year will involve an animation featuring ourselves (placed in an environment via a greenscreen) interacting with our "good" and "bad" sides, which can be based on a number of things, such as our traits, what we wish we were like, what our opposite would be etc.

Here are a few concept sketches I did while coming up with my "bad side" character.



I actually find sloths a little bit creepy for some reason, but I wanted one as a character anyway. This one represents my laziness.



This one… I’m not actually sure where I was going with this one, to be honest. I wanted a character based on my horrible procrastination problem, and so decided to have one that is the cause of said procrastination. Tempting people with TV/video games/internet etc. etc. etc. when they’re trying to work and all that.

The snake thing was far too elaborate though, so I started to go for a slightly simpler and more humanoid shape, as shown on the right.



By this point I already had the basic idea of what I wanted to do for my animation: I’m trying to do my work, and my “bad side” is trying to distract me from said work, telling me I can “always do it later” or something. I had this mental image of the character’s arms stretching offscreen and pulling back a laptop or something out of hammerspace and found that pretty amusing, which is why I gave this design long arms (which get a bit more elaborate in later drawings).



Quick (inconsistent) turnaround of my sloth character, and then a little doodle of her and my other robot character.



More of my robot character, who I still need to name. Here you can see her arms are quite a bit longer, but I’ll most likely make them retractable so she’s not dragging them around with her all the time.



My robot character at work - preventing other people from doing work. :P



She'd been grinning creepily in nearly every drawing so far, so I decided to see what she’d look like when things aren’t going her way.



And last but not least, a bit of foreshortening practice and silly expressions.