character design

Stylization Experiments

| Saskia
This is the view I wish I had! I’m only 165 cm so I saw mostly other people’s heads. Still enjoyed it though! My boyfriend took this picture.

I had the pleasure to attend a rock concert again after years! I had given me and my boyfriend tickets to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers last Christmas, and a few weeks back it was finally time. I’m in no way a regular, but when I attend I always immensely enjoy it – live music is really a totally different experience than listening to the same song on record. Though it was kinda short, the end felt a bit rushed and they didn’t play Under The Bridge for some reason, I had an amazing time.

This experience led me to draw the band members and experiment with simplification. I love adding little details, but I feel my work can be stronger by leaving out more and focus on what matters.

I’ve only finished Anthony, because finding the look I wanted proved to be quite the challenge. I changed the pose and shapes countless times, going back even after I started blocking in colour.

When I felt I had the pose figured out, I might have gone astray again by creating more visual noise with detailed shading and tattoos.

I like the result! But I’m afraid I won’t finish the other band members!

Artstation Challenge: Chosen Scenes & Character Designs

| Saskia

Another update on my entry for the Artstation Box of Mystery Challenge – only a good three days left to finish my pieces!

I’ve decided on refining the follow scenes: an establishing shot, the kids discovering the imaginary magic of the box, causing havoc and the box being driven off to the trash. It feels weird to end the story with a sad keyframe, but I better work on four scenes I have visualized well than trying how to figure out what the ending would look like, I think!

I also had a shot at the designs of the two kids:

I loosely based them on my own sister and me for convenience’s sake. Would loved to delve deeper into this (I never designed kids before), but time is not my friend!

Wish me luck!

I did it, I graduated!

| Saskia

I did it, I graduated! I have officially a Bachelor in Design now! 😀

And here it is at last: the final lineup of harpy characters from my graduation project. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to iterate on colours too, perhaps I will still do that later on. 🙂

Circus Animation Progress

| Saskia

Time to show some progress for that circus animation, isn’t it? I should be ashamed, I’m working on it for months now and still haven’t showed anything! Thing is, preparing all the characters, props and backgrounds for a paper cut animation takes the most time, while it only starts coming to life in the end when you finally can start animating.

Anyway, without giving away the whole story of this 30-second animation, these are the characters, a knife thrower and his lovely assistant:

Work in progress of the main background
First puppet in the works…

And after scanning, printing on the right paper, protecting it with fixative and carefully cutting it…

…the fun task of making the edges of the paper black begins. This is to make sure the edges don’t reflect on the plastic sheets between the characters and the background, as this reflection would be visible in the animation.

You can imagine this is task that requires full concentration, as almost anything involving paper puppets, haha! Drawback of this black line is that it bleeds into the front side a little, so all the parts have this black line around them now. 

And this is where this black line becomes a problem: on the arms for example, when the parts overlap more during movement, this black line becomes visible. Oh well, nothing to be done about it!