The end goal of this project is to produce a book, this week I finally had enough work to get a solid layout for the test printing of this book. Since I'm printing with Blurb I've been using their software "Bookwirght" to produce the book. I'm looking at around 45 pages of content at the moment which is insane, as I only initially thought I'd have 20-25 pages. On top of that development, working through the book has helped me out as I can clearly see an end in sight for this project, so I feel less overwhelmed with it all. With the rough layout in place I can also see where gaps are so I can plan for what to fill them with. I did however struggle when It came to the cover for the book, so I'm planning on doing more work on that in the coming weeks.
Bookwright Test Layout
The rest of the week was spent working on the Toad Mother, Thumbelina's Mother, and Prince characters.
At the end of the book Thumbelina and the Sparrow travel to South Africa, (where some Swallows migrate.) Here they meet faeries that live within flowers, along with the faerie prince.
"..............Between these pieces grew the most beautiful large white flowers; so the swallow flew down with Tiny, and placed her on one of the broad leaves. But how surprised she was to see in the middle of the flower, a tiny little man, as white and transparent as if he had been made of crystal! He had a gold crown on his head, and delicate wings at his shoulders, and was not much larger than Tiny herself. He was the angel of the flower; for a tiny man and a tiny woman dwell in every flower; and this was the king of them all."
During the planning stages of this project (way back in week 2) I chose the flower I wanted the prince to live on
a Trichosanthes cucumerina or Snake Gourd flower
I went for a standard prince charming type of character with him. I wanted him to be a broad and bold character, but not intimidating like the toad mother.
some initial designs, I played around with the idea of him being a lot younger, but in the end I did not want him to look too childlike.
Merging designs, choosing colors
The prince ( I still need to design his wings)
Though not 100% finished this character turned out to be very fun to design, The goal for next week is to get his design and character sheet finished.
A quick post for week 9 , Thumbelina's house is finished, and a lot has changed from the last design. Drawing over the 3D blockout I added more detail to the house, having been inspired by Alexandre Zedig Dibonine work.
Front View
Initial 3/4 Sketch
Mid-week I started working on some prop design, specifically Thumbelina's tabletop house, I liked the idea of converting the original pot she was planted in into her small home. ( "Here is a barleycorn of a different kind to those which grow in the farmer's fields, and which the chickens eat; put it into a flower-pot, and see what will happen.")
initial sketches
Exploring more pot designs, I liked the idea of a re-purposed teapot as opposed to a traditional flower pot
progression between the initial teapot and Thumeblina's home
Next Week I plan on finishing the Teapot home off, and moving on to some more characters.
This week was all over the place so I'm just going to post all of my work and try to make sense of it all.
Thumbelina's home:
After some more work on Thumbelina's home I didn't like how my initial home looked, so I went back to the drawing board. From a 3/4 view the design was fine, but from the front it was too narrow and did not put out the cosy vibe that I was going for,
Last weeks home
colour thumbnail
trying to finish the image, but it didn't work out.
At this point in the week, I went back to my designs and built a few new houses. I ended up after some feedback going with mainly the same design but extended out to fix the problem of it being too narrow from the front, with tweaks to the roof and door design.
Feeling a lot better about the shape I painted a quick front shot of the house.
front paint over
For the 3/4 view I used the same process as before where I rendered a "clown" pass in 3Ds Max (to make selections in Photoshop easier) and then a lighting pass for reference.
clown pass
basic lighting
local colors with notes and lighting
I also put my front view in a scene, but didn't really like how it was going. I'd really lost the environment and color pallets from my initial reference of Denmark, so I'll be going back to that next week.
Character work:
Characters were a bit hectic as well, I worked into my butterfly character and struggled with how I was going to design the wings. With my main issue being that I didn't want them to distract too much from the rest of her design, but I also did not want to leave them blank. After some feedback, I came to a conclusion with the wings though I want to work on making her more fluid in her movements. It was recommended to me to look at Glen Keane's Duet and Degas’ Ballerina workSo I'll be studying those two later on.
Duet
Degas Dancers
More work was done on the frog son, I wanted to to give him more personality through his design. made him a bit more nervous and bug eyed, to contrast his confident, focused mother.
Mid week I was struck with the notion that I was doing everything wrong, and I needed to redraw all of my characters because they just did not work. Whether or not that is true I indulged those thoughts and gave myself a morning to redraw Thumbelina and her mother, to get it out of my system.
The mother did not change that drastically but she does feel looser in her design
Thumbelina's changes were mainly in her costume, as I had an issue with that early on. I looked back into traditional danish fashion for the redesign. I also squished her proportions down a little to see how it looked, but I feel as though I can do better.
In the end I'm not sure how to feel about this week, work was produced but a lot was tweaking existing work. Since nothing's "finished" so I don't feel like I've moved forward at all. So I'll need to get some momentum going again.
To fulfil the environment section of my FMP I wanted to go with some interior and exterior shots of a building so I chose to design the home Thumbelina an her mother live in. I knew this would be a challenge as I've never really done environment or building design. I started by gathering reference of the type of house I wanted to design with the main focus on the paintings from Baltic Light- Early open-air painting in Denmark and North Germany and Christen KØbke Danish master of light, for the environment I wanted to surround this house. I then began thumbnailing.
References
Initial Thumbnails
Refined thumbnails with colour, I chose the middle design
With the design chosen I made a few composition thumbnails of the final image I wanted to produce.
To help with the final visualisation I created a 3D model of the house and put it in a scene.
This whole process was fairly frustrating for me, since I fairly new to environment design I was never sure where to start, how to finish, or if I was doing this the right way in the first place. Seeking a break from designing the home I switched to designing a character. I'd previously written out this character that I actually started 2 weeks ago, but I was so disappointed with the results I didn't write about it here, and was set on pretending that it didn't happen. This was the butterfly character, who plays a very minor role in the book, never speaking and being given only a few lines of a scene but was a character I thought would be fun to design, and give a bit more of a role in my interpretation. "A graceful little white butterfly constantly fluttered round her, and at last alighted on the leaf...... She took off her girdle and tied one end of it round the butterfly, and the other end of the ribbon she fastened to the leaf, which now glided on much faster than ever, taking little Tiny with it as she stood."
With the above description I immediately thought of designing the butterfly character as a dancer with the idea that after escaping the toads Thumbelina meets the butterfly, who cheers her up by dancing with her sash ( as my Thumbelina design lacks a girdle). After my initial go at this character I ended up with this:
yep
Which embodied nothing of what I wanted with this character, I ended up making the butterfly too stick bug like, and with a bunch of failed sketches to go along with this one, I gave up on the character until this week. I looked into Victorian era dancers, and that lead to circus performers, who this new iteration is based off of.
The biggest challenge, and what drew me to push this character was figuring out her multitude of arms. A show that I'm a fan of , Steven universe does this quite well, so I knew it could be done.
Sardonyx- A Steven Universe character
With my new reference in mind I actually came up with the new character fairly quickly, though I still need to sort out colour schemes and her wings I like where this design is going.
design variations and colour schemes
Some posing
More posing
I will be continuing and hopefully completing this character, and Thumbelina's home next week.
