Summer Work 2011

Summer Work 2011

My summer work sent to me by uni consisted of three parts-

Part One was to fill a whole sketchbook with life drawings of either people or animals in an interesting place

For Part two I had to experiment on A3 sheets with colour and media to develop human or animal studies from my sketchbook into simplified characters. Also had to draw the characters in a number of poses and expressions

And finally Part Three I had to develop ideas for animated films based on your 'real life' observations and using my characters. 

Part One

 I was looking forward to this part of the project as I love life drawing. I left it for when I went on holiday in August to Rhodes, a Greek island as I felt that this was the most interesting place that I would be visiting this summer! These are the drawings I did..

Some didn't work out the way I would have wanted- some weren't very good at all, sometimes I had trouble working out perspective. However I am really happy with most of them as I feel that quite a few of them are a lot stronger than previous drawings. I managed to capture a number of different poses and positions as well as a variety of different people of different sizes, shapes and ages! I really enjoyed doing this.




Part Two


This part I dreaded, I had previously done a project on character design and soon found that it wasn't my strongest point! I generally find character design quite a hard thing to do! However I had another go and this is what I came up with -


First I took my sketchbook and from that I took a few drawings of the same people and different people with similar builds and shapes and put them all together onto A3 sheets of paper.

This one is of different men with the same sort of build. I added a cape onto all of the as one of the men that I used from my sketchbook on here always wore his towel round his neck like a cape, and so I thought instead of taking it out why not make it interesting and put it on all of them. I'm happy with this as they all look like the same person.

This is of a women that used to hang around the pool with her grand children, she had a bad back and so she hardly ever stood up. She did like to tell her grandchildren off though..her voice was very loud! When she wasn't doing that she was always reading her book.

The first image on the top is of three different men and the bottom image is of the same man. I didn't get to know the characters of them very well as they were quite quiet and kept themselves to themselves!

The above two images are mainly of the same girl except from  two of the drawings. All of these girls used to read  their books allllllllllll the time! 

This is of a little girl with blonde curly/wavy hair - she loved her ice cream!

And finally the above two images are of the same man, this man was very interesting. He was mainly quiet, sitting or laying and watching the world go by. I love the shape of his face too, I found it quite unusual. He certainly stuck out to me!


So after I did this I then chose three of them to turn them into a character for my story. I chose the little girl with blonde curly hair, the larger older lady and the man with the narrow limbs and interesting face. I did this so that I had a real variety with gender, age and size to be able to make an interesting story and for it to be aesthetically pleasing. So here are their character sheets.

Overall I'm very happy with the outcome of these characters. I feel that I should have done more in the way of character turnarounds and emphasized the emotions a bit more on some of them. I rendered them with watercolour and coloured pencils.

Part Three

Story boarding is fine when you know what story you're going to do! Again, I don't find this bit so easy - as in making up a story. nothing on holiday happened that gave me a lot of inspiration for a story. I know that from looking at the characters and what they a wearing that it would have to be set on a beach or round a pool but that's as far  I got. And so at the last minute I came up with this...

It was a pretty simple story but I felt that it was quite effective. The storyboard wasn't rendered to the quality I would have liked to do but unfortunately I left it far too late and so it was rushed- something I will not be doing again. 

Overall with the whole project I was very happy, if done again I would have given myself more time to complete my work so that it would be to a higher quality. If I had done that in the first place I would have had a lot more time to work out a couple of stories, maybe choose the best and develop it a bit further to make it stronger.