Week 2- Finding Thumbelina

This week I continued with Thumbelina sketches though I love how the look they did not fit particularly well with Thumbelina's description. In the book Thumbelina is described as "delicate, frail" and "quite slim." So looked into having her design reflect those aspects.

early concept line up, though I like 1,2 and 3, 5 is closer to the books description

I was struggling with how to design her face, as there isn't any description past her being "beautiful" in the books. I was given the suggestion from Zhane James-Marshall  to look into what was considered beautiful back in 18th century Denmark. When researching Hans Christen Anderson, there was some information on his unrequited loves, so I used them as a basis for some character studies, with Jenny Lind a Danish singer being my main inspiration.

final study

at the end of the week I took a break from designing Thumbelina and instead looked into potential styles for my illustrations. A flat textured style was the original plan for this project, but I felt like this needed testing, so I took one of the earlier concepts of Thumbelina and coloured her.

Though I like how this looks at the moment I do want to see how a painted form complex style would look like.

Week 1- Research and planning

As the title suggests this week was dedicated to research. something I do at the beginning of every project. I began by going through the book of Thumbelina highlighting any and all potential assets that I could design.

There was a lot

I ended up with a potential,

• 17-20 characters
• 18  Sets/Environments
• 18-20 Props

Which I cut down to this list:

Characters: 10

• Thumbelina
• Prince
• Swallow
• Mother
• Toad mother
• Toad son
• Butterfly
• Field mouse
• Mole
• Flower Spirits

Environments: 10

Mother’s home interior and exterior (garden)

Forest –summer-winter

Tiny’s home x2

Swamp-stream

Field mouse home- exterior (one shot purposes)

Underground tunnel (one shot)

Swallows nest (white marble)

Props:

Varied throughout environments and characters

So I will  be designing the key assets from this list as well as picking a few of my favourites from the list. With that in mind I also produced a rough time plan:

though this is subject to change

Over Christmas I read Mike Yamda's Notes on his and Victoria Ying's process when creating there own stories (you can find it here). This featured a helpful style guide template, which I've used to help find a style for my project.

Style guide (unfinished)

I also referenced Rough Draft Jr and how they broke down colour and how they used it to tell their visual development process. So I set about making some colour keys for each scene in Thumbelina.

At this point, to help with colour keys, and just for general research I went through my first (but not last) research binge, where I find as may relevant books as possible and bookmark and scan a tonne of images.Firstly I looked into art of books for various animated movies:

The Art of Rio- for the colour keys and its extensive development of bird characters (for the swallow character), and environment work.

The Art of Ratatouille: For its night scenes and development of rat characters (for the field mouse character)

The Art of Mr Peabody and Sherman- For their colour work, specifically when representing  renaissance Italy and for how they integrate 3D block-outs into their development process.

I also looked into how I could represent Denmark in the 1800s, where this story is set. As I could not find photographs of that time, I looked into painters of that era. I came across these two books, Baltic Light- Early open-air painting in Denmark and North Germany and Christen KØbke Danish master of light. From these books I found that paintings of Denmark often had a warm yellow glow to it, something that I'd like to portray in the beginning scenes of my project.

With that In mind I  gathered some references of the types of environments I wanted for the Thumbelina story.

Though this is a good start I'd like to edit these later on, and drive the colour pallet by emotion and mood rather than just environments and seasons.

At end the week I started on my Thumbelina sketches, gathering some Initial reference:

And producing these sketches,

This is where my week ends but I've still got a lot of development to go with this character.

Thumbleina Week 0- Getting to go ahead

This Week I pitched my Final Major Project idea in the form of a presentation, explaining my reasoning behind wanting to do this project. In the end I got the idea approved by my tutors with some notes on making the project smaller, since as it is there are a lot of potential assets for me to be drawing (over 15 characters, 16 environments plus various props.) But the presentation served to help me answer the question "why this project?" I thought It'd be a good idea to write that down here as well.

So, why this project? 

In my previous projects (which you can see here) I've been able to design characters, but only within a limited time frame (3 weeks) I wasn't able develop them past the initial development, and I only had the time to present them in a single pose. I aim to with this project increase the complexity of my characters and produce full character sheets with turnarounds, gesture shots, expressions etc. Being able to show multiple development shots on each character sheet and work with sketches for a longer period of time is something that I've wanted to do for a while now. As much as I enjoy creating stand alone characters, I find most of the fun comes from exploring the character once the design is set.

Betty- a Previous Character

I also want to develop my environment and prop design, as as it stands I only have characters in my portfolio, and if I want to become a visual development artists I'll have to expand my designs past that. As well as myself just wanting to learn new things, environment and set design being one of them.

In addition to environments I'm going to take this opportunity to  finally learn how to colour key, and be able to tell a story through colour and light.

a monster in Paris- colour key

As for why the story of Thumbelina? 

I found that Thumbelina is  a story that hasn't been retold a lot, and isn't as well know as the other mainstream fairy tales. So I  don't need to worry about being compared to other retellings of this story. The book also has a surprisingly large cast of characters, lots of shifts in environments and various props and costume changes. So I have a lot of material to work with for this short story. Not to mention I just enjoy how this story reads.

By the end of this project I'd like to print  a small book filled with the best development drawings from this project.

More to come after the Christmas break!