We were set the task of creating characters based on our interests. I used mostly pencil throughout my work as I just wanted them to be sketches.
I like parkour so that was one of my first interests which later informed the diving man gif (as I had watched quite a few videos of people running by this point). I used a fineliner to exaggerate certain bits of these.
Another interest of mine is zombies, or rather the idea of an apocalypse (I enjoy shows and movies on them), Pencil was a useful tool here because I sketched a lot of them out faster. The idea for Meghan (who later became a GIF ) stemmed from this interest. I had a lot of fun thinking of the different expressions and how she would react to situations.
I do wish that I had spent some more time with this idea and used more media's to develop it. The Gif was unsuccessful and I think it was partially down to the lack of media development at this stage.
I also thought about sci-fi and Artificial Intelligence as it is something that I find interesting. Although none of the ideas made it to the final gif stage Spindler and Scramble (Robot and boy above) have developed into a short series of comics that I am working on.
I drew some pugs as well as they are my favourite dog, these didn't develop just because I struggled with getting the proportions right. It would have been nice to do a pug gif but their faces are pretty challenging to draw.
The next few drawings I did came from the idea of Atlantis (an idea that came from Vis Com). I thought about how the tales would move and what mermaids could look like potenitally.
I did try for quite some time to get the actions of the tail right but I really struggled with it. If i could do this again I think I would definitely try a little harder and perhaps watch videos of people swimming to get better based actions.
I used water colours on the mermaids just because it felt more fitting than just pencil and I wanted to experiment with the idea of what colours they could be.
At this point we had a crit to look at what we had done so far, as my ideas weren't quite fledged yet I think that the crit wasn't as helpful for me as it could have been because the comments mostly reflected things that I was already aware of. I think having Jon Boam into the studio to look at our work was helpful though, it was good to hear about he developed his characters and I really enjoyed look at his work.
After the crit I started thinking about how to start turning what I had into gifs. I took the mermaid idea and thought about turning it into a short about mermaids having their haircut and it growing back.
Elizabeth is born from these early ideas of mermaids, as I was thinking about the sort of person who would have believed in them and created a character of a young victorian girl (as many rumours of mermaids came from sailors at this time). I did this mostly because it was getting quite late on in the project and I still hadn't made a gif.
Creating Elizabeth was a fun process and it was nice to make a smaller less complicated gif. If I had had more time I think i would have expanded it to show that she was imagining being a mermaid whilst sat with her cup of tea.
I also decided to pick up the character of Meghan the zombie slayer out of my book, I thought quite hard about the amount of frames I would need. The thing I struggled with most on this was how to make it loop seamlessly.
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