Week 15- Thumbelina's Room

This week I've focused mainly on building and prop work, but I squeezed some character work in later on.

Thumbelina's home changed structure after I received a tone of feedback from my mentor Vince Fung, who forwarded my work to Ash Huang, who gave me even more advice =). I've yet to address everything they said to me, so this house is still a WIP.

Thumbelina and her mother's home

Between working on this I also worked on Thumbelina's room. I struggled with this design, mainly because the door placement did not make sense. As Thumbelina lives in a fragile teapot I could not convenience myself that just drawing a perfectly  door shaped hole in the teapot would work any kind of  structural change to the teapot would just shatter it. I referenced back to a older sketch which had the teapot on its side so the natural hole at the top became the door and the design started to work.

Previous sketches- the top left sketch lead to the final room exterior

Thumbelina's room exterior: at this point I moved onto a different design

Finished exterior, warmer colours were used to match Thumbelina's clothes and other props

I finished off 2 props mentioned in the book Thumbelina's cradle and bed. I changed up the colour pallet from my initial cradle design to have the contrast between a cradle, something her mother made for her when she was a baby, to her current bed which Thumbelina would have made for herself.

"A walnut-shell, elegantly polished, served her for a cradle; her bed was formed of blue violet-leaves, with a rose-leaf for a counterpane."

From here I moved on to the interior of Thumbelina's room. A 3D blockout was made to test lighting and some camera shots. This was then roughly painted over for colour thumbnails.

Colour keys for Thumbelina's room

WIP thumbelina's room

Near the end of the week I cleaned up the butterfly character ready for the book.

Week 14- Character sheets

This week started out with good news, I received my Test book! Though there are obviously aspects that I need to tweak, having the physical book in my hands has been helpful. Now I know the printing quality/time Iv'e been able to plan around that which has given me an extra week to get my work done., which should give me enough time to have this book proof read by as many people as possible.

Test book, with a place holder cover

Bit of the inside work

my work this week was mainly character based I've wrapped up my characters  with render passes and some expressions/gesture work. Considering I had only planned to have 3 characters with this level of detail I definitely got carried away with these characters, which is bad from a planning aspect, but great for myself personally. I'm proud that I've made characters that I do want to take froward into further development.

Toad son render pass, I need to put in the patterns on his clothes, but he's finished

WIP Expressions

WIP gesture work for Thumbelina's mother

My finished characters I put on some rough sheets, just to organise my files a bit:

 I also went back and fixed some issues with Thumbelina's design. Her design had been bothering me for weeks, I have kept working and reworking her for awhile now, which took some time and ended up pulling me too far away from my initial designs. So late this week I decided to only paint over Thumbelina, rather that making a completely new character, make the changes as minimal as possible. Which ended up with a simple design that I like. I'm really happy that I can go with this design, (though a little annoyed that it took forever, can't win them all.)

Tweaked Thumbelina design

Week 12+13: Miscellaneous

I've decided to merge week 12 and 13 since The majority of week 12 was spent finalising my test printing book. Besides that These weeks a little disjointed I ended up tweaking some character and prop designs for the most part.

Test Cover

I changed the toad Son's costume, as I wanted a more Danish feel to his clothing (as the story is set in Denmark). His previous clothing had more of a  French/English feel to them.  He has also now inherited bad teeth from his mother which  wanted to show off to make him more goblin like, and less cute, since he is described as being "even uglier than his mother"

looking at traditional Danish clothing for inspiration

The Toad mother got a few design tweaks this week:

Worked on the prince designs, mainly on expressions:

Designing  Thumbelina's home and props inside: