Developing my Line

Over the past couple months I've been struggling to move the flavor of my character designs farther away from a clean, 2-D "cell" style and more towards illustrative renderings that take advantage of the genre of animation we're working in.

Essentially, spending less time studying stuff that looks like this:



and more time studying stuff that look like this:



About a year ago I wrote a blog called World Building in which I talked about After Effects animation and the unique challenges it poses for character design. Here's an excerpt from that post in which I talk about 2D vs cut out paper (After Effects)

"In cut-out animation, as opposed to traditional hand drawn, you do not redraw the same character over and over. Instead, you build "puppets" that are moved over time. For this reason, character designs for traditional animation tend to be pretty simple and low on detail while designs for cut-out paper can be filled with rich texture and loads of detail. This is one of the pros of the style. My characters can wear corduroy pants and houndstooth blazers as much as they like and I don't have to drive myself insane rendering those details over and over. "

Even though I've been "artistic" as long as I can remember, I've never really been a prolific drawer. In fact, it wasn't really until The Romantic that I started drawing characters... most all of my earlier work was in stop motion animation. I was designing in sculpture, which draws from a pretty different skill set than making flat illustrations.


(Characters from a stop-motion film of mine, Snyder & Newton)

With The Romantic I was simply concerned with making drawings that I thought looked good and were to my taste. I wasn't meditating on what would look stupendous when executed in the type of animation I was working with - computer generated cut-out. So I drew what I liked, which, at the time were very graphic, sometimes whimsical designs that hearkened back to the 50s and 60s. See Amid Amidi's book Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in 50s Animation to get a good idea of what I'm talking about.


(A character chart for The Romantic)

And I wound up with some pretty cool, kind of dark, kind of retro, kind of "Heneghan" designs. Some of them worked well in After Effects, some not so much. But very few of them actually took full advantage of what After Effects can really offer you - texture.

I'm confident in my ability to imagine attractive characters, but I'm NOT confident in my ability to "finish" them... inking, coloring, etc. I'm a novice inker at best. It doesn't come natural to me. Right now I need to hone my craft so that when I begin making the final character designs I can have them succeed because of my inking abilities instead of in spite of them.

Here's a look at three character's I've been working on:


Fogerty

Trevor

and Emmeline.

They're starting to get a bit more textured than some of the earlier designs you've seen on this blog. But they aren't there yet.

1.) These three were digitally inked in photoshop using a WACOM. I want to do the final versions of the puppets the old fashioned way, with real ink.
2.) I don't think I want the ink to look black. I might do the lines with different colored inks, or I might treat the final inks in photoshop. Take a look at this example of Maurice Sendak's Dear Mili. You'll notice that some of the lines are black, others, such as the lines around the orange leaves, or on the dog, are in color. If you look above at the drawing of Fogerty, imagine his blue shirt texture being a darker shade of blue, and his beard texture being shades of brown.
3.) I want to have visceral coloring. Right now they are very "flat" and cell-ish. That will be my next step.
4.) I want to move beyond outline, using shading to define shapes and a color/rendering contrast between the characters and the backgrounds to make them pop.

So that's where I'm at. More soon!

peace,
MPH