Polishing and Final Deadline
- amandabruce49
- Dec 11, 2015
- 4 min read
It's Week 10 and that means a whole week dedicated to polishing work from the Style Matrix ready for the final hand in. I would have loved more than a week as I had a lot of work to catch up on however the amount I managed to finish in the time scale I had is pretty good.
So for the majority of this week I worked on the Leyendecker Character project.
After evaluating the characters I had created for this project I felt as if it just wasn't very interesting at all and needed an extra push. I had a brainstorming session, thinking about what I'm best at and using that to push the characters to the next level.
I'm best at creating weird and unique creatures/characters, so playing to my strengths I decided to transform my enemy characters into mutant like creatures.
At first I created mood boards that I made from my Pinterest board here: https://uk.pinterest.com/amandabruce1253/viking/
After doing some research I started some sketches to create some ideas, keeping a theme of horns through the enemy characters as it's a prominent feature of many viking stories.
After some inital sketches I took a look at the original designs and through the process of iteration I transformed each character into a new mutant.
For the main enemy character I wanted to keep him fairly similar to the original design as the style is very painterly like Leyendecker's work. So to improve this character I added some new features, giving him some horns to tie him to the mutant characters. This character is an evil old man who has mystical powers and can control these mutant with the power of runes. I did some research into Norse mythology and runes to improve my design.
One of the main lower enemy characters I didn't really finsh the first time around. This was the strong man, very bouncer like and muscly. When I first designed this character I was rushing and I didn't really get across the idea that I wanted.
As you can see especially in the first design how this character doesn't come across as a huge strong man and is lacking a strong silhouette. These are two elements that I considered most when re designing the character as a mutant creature. I wanted to exaggerate the features and make him look very mean and evil.
This is the final design for this character, I also tried to replicate Leyendecker's style using the white brushstrokes in the background and introducing rim lighting.
The female character I had designed at first is one of my favourite designs however I just ran out of time to create a finalised painting.
I really like the colour palette on this design so when I was redesigning this character I tried to just bring the colour palette across yet redesign the characteristics of the character.
A faun like creature is what I decided on for the final design of this character. I would like to have produced this painting more in Leyendecker's style however due to time limits I just didn't have time.
The final enemy character is the archer. This design was one of my least favourites and I didn't enjoy designing it. This character design was lacking in detail and it was very rushed.
When redesigning this character I tried to take exsiting characteristics like the elongated face and pale skin tone to create a lizard like creature.
After redesigning this character I am actaully very pleased with the final outcome. I also tried a new style in painting using the mixer brush in photoshop. Using this technique I was able to replicate the rim lighting Leyendecker uses in the majority of his paintings.
When I redesigned the enemy characters I was finshed by about Tuesday so I had a few more days in the week to develop the NPC villager characters. I started by doing some research into Norse mythology and viking culture.
I looked into Berserkers which in Scandanavia they are shapeshifters that can take the form of a bear or wolf. This gave me an idea to create the villager characters into anthropomorphic bears which live in the area.
Once again I like to start my characters by sketching quick designs and developing certain designs further.
From these inital sketches I designed the father character. This was one of my favourite designs of the villagers however it really wasn't finished, as were many of my villager designs.
The original colour palette worked quite nicely with the character so I wanted to keep it similar and just make it look like he would still wear those clothes.
I think I was sucessful carrying the clothing and main design across. I wanted to keep more line art and strokes on these final paintings as some of Leyendecker's work has some heavy line art.
I took a lot of inspiration from Brother Bear when createing the grandmother character as a bear.
I wanted to keep the colour palette fairly subtle and simply colour pick from the original painting and tie in the colours to the new character design. I feel as is this character does need more development however during Christmas holiday I may get round to returning to these designs.
More inspiration came from Brave, another Disney film, when redesigning the young child character. I really love how they designed the young bears and how cute they looked, so I wanted to re create that look on my character.
This has to be one of my favourite characters as it's just so damn cute! I think I will come back to this project in the end as I want to really develop these characters and bring them together.
I'm fairly pleased with the promotional art I created for this project. I feel as if I could have made it more into Leyendecker's style if I had more time to polish. However considering I had 5 days to go back to this project and pretty much recreate 6 characters I'm proud of the work I have produced.
As next week is the final week before the Christmas holidays it's time for FMP stuff! Tuesday next week is mine and Georgia's presentation for FMP and we've come up with a pretty solid idea in making an 'art of' book. For this presentation we have numerous subject ideas which just need to be shot down or approved and improved upon.