Week 6- The Toads

This week I moved on to a couple of new characters, the Toad Mother, and Toad Son, 2 main antagonists of the Thumbelina story. I started out by gathering reference of common toads found in Europe, then I drew  studies of them, I found a few key features of their bodies, such as how they have thing upper arms and bulging forearms, with slit like eyes, and molted skin.

I also gathered some reference of real people to aid my design. I referenced the looks of  Lattice Royal, Divine and Elaine Stritch to get the feeling of unapologetic eccentricity that I wanted in the mother, with features from  Victorian criminals to make her unsettling.

With my reference in mind I sketched a few initial designs:

Toad mother designs, I chose 4 in the end with 2 in a close second

I struggled with which of the above designs to pick for my final, as each of them had their own merits when asking for feedback people liked all of them for different reasons as well. The only one I could safely write  off was number 1 as she did not seem as villainous as the rest.

A quick re-sketch of my two favourite designs, the 2nd was a shorter and more fluid precess to the 1st

I was unsure whether or not I would design the Toad son as he doesn't really do anything in the original story. ("In the swampy margin of a broad stream in the garden lived the toad, with her son. He was uglier even than his mother, and when he saw the pretty little maiden in her elegant bed, he could only cry, "Croak, croak, croak."") But I felt the mother needed the contrast of another character with her. I  imagined the toad son as a small scrawny character, a large brutish type bodyguard for his mother (something I scraped as I wanted the mother to look the most dangerous or the two) and a straight up toad, (as all he says in the book is "croak".) as I thought it would be fun to have the mother look more unhinged, talking to a toad that cant respond back.

Colour Pallets based off my reference, with the chosen pallet on the right

I plan on going back to the Toad son as he's not as strong as the toad mother in his design, besides that I'm happy to leave them for now.

Week 5 Thumbelina's Mother

Having spent a few weeks on my Thumbelina design I was pretty eager to begin a new character, and Thumbelina's mother seemed like a good choice. Looking at the book Thumbelina's mother isn't described in detail, so I had free reign over her design. Her age is not specified, though she can not have children which could be due to age, though she could simply have no husband.

I can tell that she truly cared for tiny because there are descriptions of the small items she crafted for Thumbelina,  in addition to clothes for Thumbelina to wear. "A walnut-shell, elegantly polished......her bed was formed of blue violet-leaves, with a rose-leaf for a counterpane.......during the day she amused herself on a table, where the woman had placed a plateful of water. Round this plate were wreaths of flowers with their stems in the water, and upon it floated a large tulip-leaf, which served Tiny for a boat."  I wanted to convey that Thumbelina's mother is a kind and warm woman who lives a simple life. A seamstress and a gardener she spends most of her time looking after Thumbelina and keeping her out of harms way.

I was inspired by a few key images to base this character off of. They are all  European paintings produced in the era that this was written.

The Seamstress, Charles-Amable Lenior

View from the Loft of the Grain Store at the Bakery in the Citadel of Copernhagen, Christen Kokbe

The Flower Girl, Hans Zatzka

Then I began designing starting with quick sketches and becoming more refined as I went on

initial body sketches

initial face designs

chosen face with variations on the hair

clothing sketches, I chose the dress on the far right for my final design

At this point I moved onto colour pallets. I'd always imagined the mother character being predominately pink like my initial inspiration. but I also tried a few colour schemes based off of Mrs Banks from Mary Popins, as a tutor remarked that my character reminded me of her. This turned out very well and the blue colour scheme came a close second to the pink.

Colour variations

line art and flat colour pass

I will come back to render these flat colours at a later date, as for now I plan to move on to new characters.

Week 4 - Character sheets

This week I finished  off the design for Thumbelina. I started off the week with gesture poses for last weeks design. But the did not turn out very well, I found myself struggling with the design, I'd lost some of the whimsy of Thumbelina that I had with previous designs.

Since I was between two designs I decided to merge aspects of them. I found a lot of the fun of my previous design came from the hair, so that was the biggest change.

Design Development

Feeling better about my design I moved onto colour. I wanted to keep her fairly harmonious with her base colours being from barleycorn (as the book states that she was born from a barely corn.) With a shot of colour for her sash, as she'll use that to help her carry objects, and navigate her surroundings.

Colour scheme 4 was chosen

With the design set I put her to a general pose for rendering.

I also had another go at gesture posing, however this time I had some reference from life drawing this week to go on. Denzil Forde (portfolio) also let me scan his drawings to use as reference as well.

Pose from life drawing with notes

Thumbelina fixing her dress with Denzil Forde's image as reference

I put my gestures, and improved expression sheets onto a rough character sheet for Thumbelina.

Though I will be adding more to Thumbelina later, now's a good time to move on to other characters. As I've spent a lot of time on my main character I'd like to complete 2 characters this coming week.

Week 3- Finding Thumbelina Part 2

This week I continued with designing Thumbelina. She  is described as fragile and delicate in the story and I felt that I should try and push that aspect of her. First I wanted to get her face right, so I sketched out a few ideas, and the tested one of them with various quick expressions and hairstyles. Then I moved onto the body and costumes.

Sketchbook work- drawing a few ideas then taking my favourites into Photoshop

Test Expression sheet

Hair variations

Costume variations with the final on the right

For next week I plan on drawing some gestures with this character, try to get a feel for how she would move and interact with her environment.

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!