Tag: isobel stenhouse

This week started with my 1-1 with Isobel Stenhouse where she gave me some tips for what to include in my presentation on Monday such as including my development work and what inspired my designs. The rest of the week I continued creating my turnarounds for my presentations. Then I combined everything together to create my presentation, the hardest part is that it’s meant to be only 4 minutes so I had choose what I wanted to include.

On Monday we had our presentation and it was great getting to see everyone else’s work especially the environmental people as I haven’t seen what they have been doing the entire time. I want to continue to develop my character turnarounds including animating them turning so that I can put them on Social Media. After, I also want to add some of my outcomes to my portfolio by putting them on my website.

In this weeks session I received feedback to include 3/4 view poses for both my characters and my props as well as making the poses less stiff and more dynamic. When drawing out my poses I should include the under structure to help with the anatomy of the characters.

I started by creating my final prop sheets including a full turnaround with 3/4 views. I added a Christmas themed border and titles to the sheets to make all of the pieces feel cohesive and polished when finished. I wanted to keep the annotations because they are useful to give context of what the design is, how it is constructed, and how it should look.

I then started creating an expression sheet for the characters to accompany their character poses, I tried to focus on expressing the key aspects and traits of their personalities though their facial expressions. I feel this also gives the viewer a good introduction to the characters and a better understanding of who they are internally. I also tried to do them from different angles.

This session we spent some time going over how to present our work and what we are expected to create for our final outcomes by looking at relevant examples. The feedback that I received on my work was to once again consider them in 3D and to have less symmetrical Poses.

I started this week by drawing out my props, considering colour, textures, and perspectives. I wanted to combine some of the traditional Christmas elements or design themes with more traditional props. I think one of my weaknesses is designing props, as its difficult to create something that can be unique but grounded and believable at the same time.

Next I started to sketch out my characters in combination with my props in a variety of dynamic poses, I didn’t get to finish these before the session as I also had an Adobe course this week. But I would like to sketch out poses for each of the characters and then choose some of them to clean up.

I also thought about what I want to have as finished pieces to present that I can include in my Portfolio so that I can work to have these created for next week as it’s the penultimate session.

• 2 character Turnarounds – Elf & Santa
• 1 Expression Sheet – Elf
• 2 Prop Breakdown Sheets
• 1 character Line up with pose drawings

This week started with a 1-1 session with Isobel where she gave me some feedback on this weeks work and any advice for the weeks ahead. She gave me the advice to practice drawing realistic human figures as it will help me with anatomy and designing characters and suggested the website bodies in Motion. As for my work she liked that I had looked at the volumes of the characters and would now like to see them in more asymmetrical poses. This week we are working on costume design and hair design and so I would like to present these alongside the characters in pose.

I started by drawing out my costume designs for each of the characters as well as some updated designs for my props. I considered how they would all look next to each other, including height and shape language.

Following Isobel’s advice, I spent some time doing some quick sketches on bodies in motion to help warm up before drawing the characters in pose and in costume. I kept the duration short because I wanted to focus more on the form rather than the details. I would have liked to have done more this week but I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to work on this project.

This week we started with our session with Isobel Stenhouse to get feedback on this weeks work, I had already emailed by work to Isobel in advance of todays session so she could take a look at it. The day before our session, she responded to my email and gave me some insightful feedback on my designs.

During the session I got to see how everyone else’s projects were developing and its evident now how unique each of these projects are going to be. I had some technical issues when presenting my ideas, but Isobel elaborated on the feedback she emailed me which made it easier to understand the direction that she was coming from and it applied to everyone else as well. Going forwards I will consider the volume and 3D design of the characters to tailer it more to the game concepts of the brief. I also had some personal feedback in relation to the props to consider how to make them more unique or complex by incorporating the Christmas theme into the design.

So to start this week, I wanted to elaborate on my chosen character designs by exploring their volumes and their design from different angles.

I then started looking ahead at character outfit inspirations so that I can combine them with my character designs and pose them. I want to try and do something more original than the traditional costume designs and be more influenced by their roles and personalities. It was also good to start looking at colours, patterns and textures.

This week we started with our session with Isobel where we once again shared our work from this week, it was good to see how everyone else’s projects were developing. Although everyone was receiving similar feedback to stop jumping ahead to designing the characters without first exploring who they are and their personality, this did not apply to me. When I presented mine I received feedback that I have created easy to imagine characters. My next steps are to start doing some character sketches experimenting with shapes, expressions and body language.

Now that I’ve explored a bunch of different designs I chose some of the ones that I liked best and annotated their features to see what works best and what doesn’t. Once I get feedback on these designs, I can start creating full roughed up versions.

We had our meeting with Isobel to discuss our initial ideas and she gave us a preposed schedule which will help me to plan out my time management and make sure that I am keeping on track. She also gave us advice which we can apply to all of our works such as to consider the gender of the characters and consider who the characters are in terms of personality and motivations. I will consider these this week as I flesh out my idea and designs.

I started this week by doing research into my theme and creating mood boards based on different aspects of the designs I need to create. I did this by looking at different sites such as Pinterest and Google and then sorting and collaging the images that I found. I hoped to find some more abstract and interesting sources of inspiration. Based on the feedback I tried to find a variety of characters in terms of race and gender to have a more diverse line up to be inspired by.

Now that I have my mood boards I wanted to solidify my characters personalities and find poses that reflect the characters that I can use for my sketches. Using the brief, I identified some of the key poses that the characters would be doing and then I researched model references for these poses. I also created a mood board showing some character design layouts and examples of character design for 3D characters to use as inspiration.

Based on the feedback from last week I wanted to spend some time establishing who my characters are, their personalities and motivations so that the designs I create can reflect this.

At the beginning of this week we received our brief for the Isobel Stenhouse project. We started with an introduction where she told us about all the projects she’s worked on and the different roles she’s worked in before explaining the brief to us. Below I have included the project slides that are relevant for the character option which is the one that I have chosen to do.

Going into this project, I think the biggest challenge for me is going to be adapting to a lineless art style as the characters are intended to be interpreted in 3D so this is going to push me out of my comfort zone and explore different designs. The first thing that I want to do is decide on a location and genre so that I can personalise the brief to match. I started by mind mapping out some ideas that I can choose to explore. I wanted to come up with something more original and not something that first comes to mind when you read the brief.

I considered a bunch of different locations and concepts and then I decided which of my ideas would be better suited for the brief and that felt unique. In the end, I decided on choosing the Christmas one for my final idea because I felt like it fits with the timing of this project and can fit with the requirements of the brief. Now that I have chosen a genre, era and location, I am able to rewrite the brief to include this information.

A kid drops into a north pole toy workshop on the top left, cushioned by teddy bears when they land. They sneak their way past where Santa is working alongside a robot elf. The kid finds a present to place under a bookshelf. They climb the present to reach and steal the naughty or nice book. They exit to the right of the screen (if they don’t get caught).

Then I can start to generate some rough thumbnails and sketches for this project such as characters, props, poses and story based on my existing knowledge. Using the thumbnails I now know which aspects and elements I need to conduct research for and areas to look for in search of inspiration. I also plan to look into examples of character design specifically for 3D.