Back Again

I haven't posted about anything in quite awhile and I feel that it's required of me to document what's happening both in my head and on my workbench. To be honest, not much has been happening on my work bench and I feel inclined to blame it on the fact that I've been hard pressed with written projects, but perhaps that would be just a convenient excuse.

In truth it has been a bit difficult with the pressure of a project hanging over my head and has caused me to procrastinate quite a bit more than usual, getting started is always the hardest part.

I've managed to create five ideas for potential project worthy characters and organised all of their development in neat folders (a have a habit of becoming meticulously organised whenever things get scary or a deadline is looming). The first of which is a squat pirate captain with certain swordfish like traits. The second is a fragile female mystic with a cacoon-esque turban. A grotesquely fat (and quite abstract) clown monster. A small orphaned puppet boy who is somewhat of a combination of Oliver, Pip Pirrup, and Pinocchio. And finally a strange quadrupedal clown who for whatever reason seems to have earned himself a doctorate as he is inexplicably named "Dr. Jangles".

I hope to make sculptures of all five of the characters, but I feel that this is impractical given my time constrains. When trying to get some consensus on which three characters I should definitely make I received some interesting if not varied feedback.

One of my fellow students said that "Dr. Jangles" and The Orphan seemed to be the most developed, with the Captain, Mystic, and Monster all being far too abstract or more "ideas of what they are" rather than being a fully realised character. My supervisor on the other hand seemed to revel in the conceptual nature of particularly the mystic.

Personally I imagine that "Dr. Jangles" would be the most fun to sculpt and I'm quite keen to do him justice. The Monster is quite interesting conceptually, but I imagine she would be quite difficult to get right. At this time I'm inclined to choose, "Dr. Jangles", The Captain, and The Mystic, as they each have quite interesting shapes that I believe will push me into strange challenges that I've never really experienced before.

Also, just briefly, my supervisor made a great point of asking me to think about how each character would move and act. This was something that had been resting in the back of my head, but had never properly addressed. So I am now in the process of drawing rough walk cycles, playing loosely with plasticine and using whatever I can get my hands on to simulate the correct feeling for each character's movement (at one particularly creative stage I filled an old plastic bag with rags and mandarines and shuffled in across the kitchen bench, the results of which I might post here).

That's all for now, I'll post some of the developmental work for each character here when I figure out how to do so.

[Above]: Dr. Jangles final design sketch.

[Above]: Ms. Magwitch sketches, the first was done almost a year ago when I woke up in the middle of the night.

[Above]: Rough colour concepts for Ms. Magwitch, done with just a mouse because my tablet was faulty.

[Above]: The Captain turnaround.

[Above]: The Captain with some possible colour combinations, I'm starting to think of him as having an abnormal skin tone like green or blue.

[Above]: Ms. Magwitch taking her first terrifying steps.

[Above]: An early conceptual sketch of The Mystic

[Above]: Thinking of how the Mystic would move about, a bit of a laboured slug-like shuffle.

[Above]: Early sketches of the Orphan; Goghrey Vandewilde. He came from a noble family, hence the ponsy name.

 

[Above]: Goghrey's Orphan Regalia

[Above]: Costume choices.

[Above]: Thinking about movement.