The Story Of Thumbelina : Week 7- Homes and Butterflies

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.