Thesis Production Log: Stardate 04082013

What a week!

Shortly after I posted the last blog, I realized it's really hard for me to show my process from week to week, because (and I'm sure every artist can relate) showing something in-process is scary. I want to scream out "DON'T JUDGE THIS, IT ISN'T DONE YET!", but that's kind of the point of doing this PRODUCTION log is to note the steps it takes me to get to the end. And believe it or not, a few weeks into the design process, things are still rapidly changing.

The day after I last blogged, we had a critique in our Character Design class. I hadn't had a ton of time to get everything done as I had wished, but I was also at a point where I feel like I needed feedback in order to go any further. And boy was that instinct right!

I didn't get a very good reaction to my creatures, which at the time was disappointing. They (my two professors who team teach the class) liked the design for Sarah, and liked the direction my Sanity creature was headed, but the other two they weren't sold. Sickness wasn't interesting enough (I agreed), and Abandonment didn't really look like the fear of abandonment to them. I really liked that creature, so it was hard for me to - you guessed it - abandon him. (budum ching!)

But taking a night to sleep on it and think over what they said, I know they were completely right. That whole "kill your darlings" thing it true most of the time.

After talking it over in our Thesis Pre-Production class a few days later, I decided to switch up the story a little, in order to adjust the scope of the project as well. Instead of girl and 3 creatures, it is girl and 2 creatures. The new story is this: Creature #3 (Abandonment) goes missing, so she must take her pets out for the first time ever (dressing them up to hide their most terrifying parts) to find him and bring him home. This not only makes the amount of work for me more manageable, but I feel gives the story a bit higher stakes (taking them out for a walk isn't an every day occurrence), and gives her a deeper relationship with her pets.

Also, since I won't be modeling the Abandonment creature in 3D, that means I can go back to the original idea of only seeing that creature from the back. That was going to be near impossible to figure out how to do (in this short amount of time), so I think that was a great decision on all accounts.

I also went back to the drawing board for my Sickness creature. Instead of a gross slug-like creature, I now have a little walrus dragon, and I quite like him. I'm maintaining some aspects of the previous Abandonment creature (the open rib cage, the bipedal nature...), and adding some fun details that will give him a really unique walk - he uses his tusk as a crutch for his gimp leg. Poor fellow.

The new "Sickness" creature. His skin is saggy, scaly lizard skin, he has one eye, his left leg is only a femur, so he uses his left tusk as a crutch to help him walk. And on top of that, his uncovered rib cage is filled with tumors. He's pretty gross, but Sarah puts a sweater on him to take him out, so that keeps the draft out.

Next week you'll get to see more than just sketchbook pages, as I've been working on character sheets and color comps for tomorrow's class.

As painful as it is, sometimes a pretty big redesign is exactly what one needs. The handful of times Photoshop has died on me, it always results in a better drawing the second go-round (even when it is beyond frustrating and has brought me to tears.... ok, happy thoughts...)

In other news: our game is due in a week and it's so exciting to see it almost done. The summer will bring polish to make everything sparkly and perfect, but so far so good!

Also, I spent the evening with Ben on Saturday painting and enjoying each other's company. I used gouache (opache watercolor) for the first time ever, and understand why some people loath it, but it's definitely something I want to keep working with. Here's what I made - a little ode to spring and warmer weather (may it come quicker than it is):

Have I mentioned how much I love Art Nouveau?