STARDATE: September 11th, 2008 - Visual Development with Jason01

In 2008 I joined a visual development mentoring class on conceptart.org created by Jason Pruett aka "Jason01" (www.jasonpruett.com). It was a blast and I learned so much ^^ This was the real beginning of my character design studies and I thought by posting the journey I would find even more inspiration to continue pushing myself like I did then. Plus Jason was awesome and I figure anyone could benefit his great advice by spelunking through these posts. There's tons more of his critiques and notes on the mentoring class's forum here: http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=131799

I'm still working with these characters now - I'm redesigning and sculpting maquettes to turn my Alice in Space characters into stop motion puppets so stay tuned for more :)


FIRST POST -  September 11th, 2008, 3:38 am


Alice in Space

Well, I guess to introduce myself first - I'm a college grad who only recently discovered the real scope of the concept art world. I've done alot of costume design and portraiture but I'm committed to getting a better grasp on character design as well as a bit of everything that is concept art. I'm totally psyched that jason01 is mentoring and I can't wait to jump right into this.

So I've been working on these for the last week, half of that time I was following an entirely different theme (crazy theatrical troupe) but I was getting frustrated with it and decided to try something completely different. I sketched for a day or two, playing around with themes and finally came up with "Alice in Space". I could probably keep working on these for another week but I figured I should just submit them how they are now to see if I'm even doing this right.

Concept:

Alice is puttering around the galaxy looking for her inventor parents who are lost in space. She is accompanied by her clever alien cat and she drives her spaceship "The White Rabbit" which was invented by her genius parents before they disappeared. 

She runs into numorous crazy characters and many strange alien planets on her journey and in one instance she meets the self-proclaimed "Queen and King of the Universe". The queen and king are out to dominate space and find out "The White Rabbit", Alice's weird "ship", holds the key to power over the universe, bwahahaha! ...*cough*...anyway, I'll probably change it around as it develops but it's not supposed to be too complicated, I just needed a basic idea to start my gears running. 

-This was so amazingly fun to do btw.

REFERENCE/INSPIRATION PAGE

Jason's Critique:

Looks very 60s spacy-ish

First of all, let me just say - I really dig it. These are a lot of fun. Familiar enough to connect with them and different enough to not say it's a rip off. 

That being said, it does look very gris grimly-like. http://www.animationartgallery.com/agrisgrimlyart.html

But even he has more meat on the bones of his characters. Good thick to thin - but a little too thin. Maybe not, though - it could work. 

The main thing is - these look mainly like costume variations of basically the same silhouette. explore vastly different silhouettes and if you can't find one you like as much as you did here, go with these. 

Also - pick a definitive pose to put these people in. And push the pose. sulky, make it sulky, strong, flash gordon-y - make it really strong, wide stance . . . etc. you only have one silhouette to capture the essence of this character - and what are you going to say about him/her? boring? - just a boring stance. fun and bouncy? make lively and perky.

what ever you end up going with . . make sure it's something that you'd want in your portfolio and something that you have fun doing. If you're serious about concept art . . they do want to see variation and how you think. So keep these sketches - - they want to see your process - your journey on your way to your destination.