Week 8- A Bit of Everything

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 work So 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.