D4M: Project 2 Proposal

Next on the Agenda, each person must create a proposal for a production.  There may be three winners and therefore three productions created in the class.

My idea consists of short, 2D animated film about small tree people.

The tree people are small, dark men that are born with masks on their face.  In the short, you'll see them performing a ritual dance until a comet falls from the sky and lands in their bonfire.  Smoke and ash rise up in clouds, and when dispersed, you see another tree person crouched where the bonfire used to be.  This is how they are born.  We continue to follow the tree people with their dance until the sun goes up and they morph into trees and rest.

Here are my initial concept sketches:

What a tree person looks like

Example of tree people masks

They circle around the campfire dancing

Example of a dance motion

Comet falling from the night sky towards bonfire

A new tree person is born from the comet and bonfire

Also, this is my organizational flowchart, as well as my timeline, for the said production:

Note that no positions other than Direct, myself, have been chosen.

Organizational Chart

Timeline

I would love to get some feedback.

New Blog

Alright guys!  I just want to let you know that I've created a whole separate blog which will be as a portfolio piece where I'll display all my finished works.  This blog will still be running as a process blog.

My new blog address is ChristinePearArt.blogspot.com

You can also reach it through the menu above and hitting "Art."

Thank you for your support and I would love to get some feedback!

Christine

D4M: Menagerie ● Week 4

Alright, so this is it.  I'm done.  And here it is:

I was attempting to blend the animals and their backgrounds all together while maintaining the colour scheme.

So what I did was I first drew the animals in their separate images with the hands and then added them into this rather long landscape and finally touched up with the background and altering the colour tone of the hands.  You can see below here.

Also, here are my last two characters in their final form before they were added to the menagerie composition.

And now I am done.  I hope that you enjoyed this process menagerie.

I wonder what I'll get to do next.

D4M: Menagerie ● Week 3

Alright people, so by this week I have narrowed down my ideas to one.  This was actually quite hard for me because while I really liked one idea more than the other, I loved the palette that I had for the rejected concept.  But I couldn't simply just combine the palettes because they would be such an astronomical contrast between the subject matter and the colour palette.  So now you may be asking (Will she ever get to the point?) which idea I chose.

Well, you'll see below that I chose the idea of the hands creating puppet shadows and those shadows come to life.  I'm still not exactly sure how I am going to set this up.  Should I have it so each puppet shadow is an individual image?  Should I have it so that they are all combined and portrayed in one single composition?  I see these choices as my two main options.  I'm just not exactly which way I want it to go.  However, below you may see what it might look like if they were all put together.

I kind of put in a rough colour scheme for the background.  I figured woods for the wolf, grass and greenery for the rabbit and the dark purple as a night sky for the bat.  I may need to re-shoot the wolf hand if I am to collage the images together into one rather long set (seen above) because the lighting seems really off since it's much brighter than the rabbit hand and that's supposedly closer to the light source.  Maybe I can edit it in Photoshop?  Anyway...

I've been working on the bat recently, so I'll give you a little visual of that.  I've been really trying hard to stick to the colour scheme.  But this is still, most definitely, not finished.  I've been working on the bat really close up, and now that I am seeing it smaller up there in the corner, it's really made me consider the lighting.  I'll definitely have to create some sort of depth because right now it seems really flat, which if you consider the wolf, has not been my intention.

I really haven't started much with the rabbit, just the basic positioning of the hand.  I've been mostly taking this one animal at a time.

If you have any feedback for me, I'd love to hear it.

D4M: Menagerie ● Week 2 Continued

I've been reworking my colour concepts after I finished that last post and I thought that I'd update my visual intentions.

So after a bit of critique today, I came to the understanding that rather than developing a colour scheme from  my artist I should create a palette inspired by the artist.  Not only that, but that the palette should apply continuously through to all of the characters.  It's tough for me to narrow a colour scheme to something that needs to incorporate a lot of things, but still be called a palette, rather than a rainbow.  Anyways...

This will be the palette inspire by Thomas Thesen's work that will be applied to the bird menagerie of characters:

While this next one will be used for my shadow hand puppet illustrations after considering Tom Whalen's scheme from the images of my last post:

After developing the above palette, I wanted to put it to the test immediately.  Since I wasn't very fond of my last scheme that I made for the wolf, I had to shade it greatly from the colour palette that I originally gave it, so I reworked it.  I think it works much better.  I also believe the way I illustrated the wolf conveys better in this piece than the previous one.

I'm not finished yet.  These are all works in progress.  Mistakes are just part of that process.

D4M: Menagerie ● Week 2

I'm back with colour and more colour!

Remember those two artists I talked about earlier?  Thomas Thesen and Tom Whalen.  Yes, them.  Well, after several good looks at their works I made some colour schemes for them.  Mind you,  I made it for some different photos than the ones that have previously been posted here.  Oh, well.

Thomas Thesen's work is shown here.  For the most part I got this collection from his blog.  Anyways, his work is "A Top View from the Mushroom Forest," "Second Page of Paul Quickaboonip," and "Captain Alistair Quickaboonip."

Using a colour scheme from the three above, I applied it to a bird.  It's a Victoria Crowned Pigeon.  And I know what you're thinking.  It's a pigeon.  Yea, well. it's a pigeon with a feathered mohawk.  So I wasn't really sure what I was going for.  So I tried to do it layers like demonstrated from the last post with the insects from Thalen.  Then I moved onto attempting it with colour.  The final one is to the far right.  I tried to employ the colour scheme chosen from Thalen's image to the best of my ability.  I'm not very good at sticking to a palette.

Next, from Tom Whalen I employed these works: "Spotify Jukebox," "Cobra 10 Cover," and "Certification Training."  They're, for the most parts, illustrations he has done.

Which I adapted to create my own rough image.

I was really really having a hard time with the colour scheme here.  Because all of the colours were just too bright.  So I had to dim the wolf.  It just would not make sense for him to be brighter than the rest of the image (minus the hands).  I was also thinking that instead of having a gradation in the background, but rather morph the trees that a wolf naturally inhabits into nothingness.  Because when people do hand shadows, they're on walls, rather blank walls to enhance the shadow lines.

I was not positive about how I wanted the wolf to look at, so I made many very rough sketches, as a test run.

Anyway, this is what I've been working on lately.  I'll keep you posted.

Until next time.

D4M: Menagerie Kick Off ● Week 1

Artist Hiroshi Hayakawa has inspired to creators of my Design for Media class into a project based off of two of his signature styles of work: Figure as Landscape or Menagerie.  I have chosen the menagerie style.

A menagerie is an anthology of figures or objects related to one another through colour, theme, and design.  However, when I looked it up in the dictionary it specifically related it to animals.  So I took it.  And naturally, I had just gone to the zoo today, and were inspired by all the different birds I saw.  I especially loved the flamingos because of their necks; they were twisted in all sorts of ways.  It was also quite humorous when they would dance by rocking their legs back and forth.  But to get back to the point...

I thought maybe I could make a menagerie with these feathered creatures.  Give them character through drawing techniques or maybe I would make them patterned.  I'm not quite sure how I would do that.  Maybe importing fabrics or paper designs and colour-by-number them?

But let me tell you the two artists that I'm inspired by.

Tom Whalen is an illustrator who has made posters for many companies including Disney, Warner Bros., and DC Comics.  This is an illustration of a book cover he has made for Herring on the Nile:

I chose Whalen for his excellent use of simplicity to magnify an image, as well as his colour palette.  Everything is very well done and there aren't a lot of distractions to take away from a piece like this.

However, I chose my next artist because I love his characterizations.  They're very animated and, yes I must say it, adorable.  It amazes me how he's able to create such personality with very seemingly simple strokes.

Thomas Thesen does illustration, character designs and visual developments.  He has worked for Pixar and Dreamworks animation, as well as freelancing with Netflix and Lionhead.  Below are some of his insect sketches.

I loved how his character designs were really animated and quirky.  Something that I have never quite been able to do but it's something that I have always aspired to.

Which brings me to my second idea.  I wanted to do a sort of hand study in which I would focus on different poses that the hand creates: constrained, twisted, fist-clenched, gestured, or even shadow puppets.

Anyway, that's my thought process so far.  Let's just cross my fingers to see if things manage to work out how I envision them they will.