JASON:

next step

HAWK - great. I love the Gulliver's Travels idea. now the next step is to decide how those characters are going to look. - you've got the first step down - now what are their clothes and faces . . . here's how one professional did this next step - notice the exploration even on this seemingly given and boring project. He gives it his best. - don't do the turn arounds yet - also - don't color them yet. 

go here . . 

http://bp0.blogger.com/_2Gmp5zzO_jg/...t-JtJ-2006.jpg

although - you could do a whole book and/or animation with the characters as they are right now. . . so keep these. but take the next step and we'll go from there.

FOURTH POST: October 8th, 2008, 5:03 pm

Thanks for the help! ^^ I was having such a hard time narrowing these down but after bouncing between these 3 for awhile I think I've come up with a final choice. I really had to think ahead to where I wanted to take them. One of my favorite ideas for backgrounds was to give an ode to Alice shrinking and growing by having her visit planets with huge oversized plants, animals etc. and planets with miniaturized plants, animals, etc. so it would just "appear" that she shrunk or grew. So taking this in mind I tried to imagine how each group would look in this kind of situation...

#4: I love how cute they look together, they have a pleasant dynamic for me and I think the colors could be very bold but I don't think the backgrounds would have as much impact as I'd like them to have. I also feel like the plot would have to be shallower than I'd like. 

#3: I'm fond of Alice's oversized shirt too ^^ but having the obviously dominant queen plot is feeling a little too obvious for me. I also think it could end up a bit too predictable. The backgrounds would end up slightly too comedic I think.

#1: I really feel like this set will work the best with the overall look and feel that I'd like to pursue, the pocketwatch inspired ship is also my favorite of the ships :) I believe that this group would compliment the background ideas the best, the color choices could be more diverse and I feel like I could more easily add other characters to this set that could have alot of visual interest.

So after all that blabbering it looks like I'm going with #1 :)

THIRD POST - October 6th, 2008, 10:28 pm

Here are my lineups, I went back to the silhouettes and cleaned them up first and tried to add more character to each of them too since I thought they were a little lacking (I don't know if it made much of a difference, I've been staring at them way too long ^^), but overall this was really entertaining to do :)  It's also helping me understand more about how a strong silhouette can change the entire feel of a story - I'll definitely be working on that more on my own. Thanks for the great link by the way!

Can't wait to hear from you :)

Fellow Mentee "pepps": they are all really nice in my opinion. They have a nice feeling to them, there is variation, but still unity, i really like tham a lot, can you share a bit of your workflow with us? =p did you get one silhouette you liked for each character and reworked it to get 6, or are they 6 different ideas? Did you have some ideas in mind when you designed them. I like how they all express different characters, in a very effective way. I can immediately tell who the character is, what he's up to, just by looking at these silhouettes...great job! ME: thanks pepps! I've never done these before so I didn't really have a set workflow but I just posted a "work in process" in my sketchbook to show how I developed them since it's kinda hard for me to summarize ^^; You can check it out here: http://www.conceptart.org/forums/sho...d.php?t=135843 It shows you about 2/3's to 3/4's of what I did to get to this point. I love your reference btw, and your silhouettes look beautiful!! PEPPS: …and as far as your lineups i think that, all work as i said, it really depends on what is the relationship between the characters in the story...for example if the king and queen are to be together they might have similar shapes, if alice and the queen are to be enemies they might have opposing shapes...i guess... I love it anyway, i think it's really inspiring! keep it up =) ME: Thanks! That's a great suggestion :) I guess at this point I should start narrowing in on the exact group dynamic so I can get the best combination, I'll definitely keep that in mind while I work out the final lineup. Thanks again, this thread is awesome! JASON: ...now . . . . I like #1,3, and 4. #s 1 and 4 as they are, but #3 - I think if you're going to make the queen physically dominant she should dominate in everyway. that's the king cowering behind her. on 3 - I love alice. the oversized shirt is adorable. so now you just need to decide which one you want to go with - the outgoing adventure family (4), the defenders of the universe (1) or the queen domination (3) - which ever fits your story - go with it.

SKETCHBOOK POST - October 7th, 2008, 6:05 AM aka "Behind the Scenes" Silhouettes!!! I'm in the middle of a visual development class in the mentoring section - mentored by jason01 - and I've been working on silhouettes. Since this is my first time doing them I decided to document my progress, so below is a rather large image taking you through my stages of development to create my Alice in Wonderland/Alice in Space-themed characters.  THEATRE When I first heard that we had to choose our own theme I was totally thrilled and immediately started developing a crazy pseudo-victorian theatrical troupe. With the queen as the prima donna, king as leading man, cheshire as mysterious writer/producer, hatter as the costumer and alice as a street child. Alice would be wandering the street when she sees a discarded rabbit marionette. She would eventually come across the traveling troupe and join their world of a never ending rehearsal. I thought it would be a cool way have the characters be able to use real lines from the book in a totally natural way. However, as I was working on the silhouettes, I felt that I was falling too easily into my costume designing ways, and since I wanted to challenge myself in this assignment I started looking for alternative themes.  POSES While I was searching for a new theme, I decided to work on poses and try and establish an overall style I wanted to use. I found a great site: http://characterdesigns.com, and started plugging away. After a ton of these (more than are shown) I found a proportion I liked and started refining it.  Once I had a good sense of how I was going to draw them, I played around with them a bit and realized that I loved how little alice's head looked with a space helmet/orb on it and began researching space as an option.  ALICE IN SPACE With my reference found, I took the pose pages I had made previously and made copies to draw over. I used these to find pleasant shapes and poses that I believed would be appropriate to the theme and developed those further. It was around this point that I abandoned the hatter so that could focus more on the required characters.  With the first set submitted, I received some great constructive criticism from jason01 advising me to push the poses further and explore different silhouettes. SHAPES In response to this critique I set out making grids for body types. Since I wanted to keep some reality to the main human characters I used these as guides for "human" exaggeration. By the time I had these finished I had pretty much decided on what shapes I wanted to pursue further for each character and began modifying the silhouettes accordingly.  REVISION At the same time I began modifying the shapes I looked at way to push the poses. Since the character's outfits were mostly form fitting, I thought it was important that their poses strongly expressed their personalities. With my style a little more established at this point it became easier but it still took awhile to find something for each of the six variations that satisfied me. I definitely happy that I abandoned the hatter so early on, I think I would have gone crazy if I had to do another character at this point ;) LINEUPS So voila! Like magic the lineups appear! As you can see, I further modified the silhouettes, details mostly, but I'm a little happier with them at this point - at least I don't get sick of them immediately, j/k.  I don't think we had to but I used all the variations in my lineups, I wanted to challenge myself and see if I could get a decent set out of each of them. I don't know how well I succeeded but it was good practice. Anyway, feel free to critique (this is conceptart.org after all) or give me any suggestions on ways to improve my silhouettes in the future, I appreciate any help I can get ^^

For future reference and to avoid confusion - my user name on conceptart.org is "-HAWK-"

SECOND POST - October 5th, 2008, 1:46 am

Sorry for the delay, this is a sheet of revisions I made to my Alice in Space-themed silhouettes. I'm still not sure if I pushed them far enough shape-wise but I worked alot on finding poses I liked for them. The ones in grey were the best of my first set of revisions and the black ones are from the most recent set - I tried to loosen up and add more motion to the second set but I'm not sure if I lost too much structure?

Look forward to your feedback :)

Jason's Response:

Hawk - I love it! I really do! They have so much appeal. Now I would put them together in a lineup to see how they do together.

if you want to see a great group of pushed shapes - www.creaturebox.com

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.

Back from the Land of the Morning Calm

On July 20th I got back from South Korea where I served an 18 month mission for my church (you can find stuff about my church here: www.lds.org). It was the most amazing experience of my entire life and I really feel like I got a new start on everything. I loved the people, the culture, the food - everything! It's a little weird being back in the USA though. A bit of a backwards culture shock, especially considering I spoke only Korean 90% of the time. (I only spoke English when I was with other Americans or I was teaching English class). Spending all my time teaching, sharing my experiences, and serving others - I learned a lot about myself when I was focusing on others. It cleared away the frustrations that had been keeping me from progressing in life and becoming happier. I wouldn't trade that experience for the world.

Seeing the results of people's lives changing for the better, seeing them finally feel good about themselves and have direction in their lives - makes me know even more surely that it's through the full and complete gospel of Christ that all happiness can be attained, all hardships and frustrations can be overcome, and all progress begins. I will be honest in saying that stating things like that aloud in a world full of people who can judge so easily and harshly took a lot of courage. And learning an entirely different language to say it to the Korean people in their own language - it took a lot of humility, patience, and faith. But I had some of the most amazing experiences because of it, and I got to know the Korean people in deeper way as I talked to them about their lives, frustrations, successes. My companion and I met in their homes and we ate together, we talked to them on subways, in the streets, anywhere and everywhere. It was never about pushing my beliefs on them, it was all about them, their lives, their troubles, and how this gospel could be applied in a way that would help them.

I had sooooo much fun and I love Korea!

*You can check out the weekly letters and pictures I sent home here on my blog : jessiekateinkorea.blogspot.com

So now I'm back to normal life, though it seems a lot better than it did before ^^. I'm planning to work more on my portraiture drawing/painting and I've had some ideas about what I'd like to do with character design and all the other aspects of art that I love. So I've been looking into some online workshops and classes like the ones on [link] and I'll be tracking down all the open drawing sessions I can find.

As a awesome, amazing side effect of going on a mission I can finally feel ok with where I am in art and be happy with myself and my work. I had the worst habit of always comparing myself to other better artists and feeling so behind. I felt like I was endlessly trying to catch up with them and replicate what they were doing. But without the background and understanding of technique that they had gained through hard work and practice, I inevitably failed. I would create a piece, like it for a very short period of time before realizing that I'd failed and then I'd just start to hate it. An endless cycle of disappointment and discouragement. Never satisfied with where I was with my art and always reaching for something beyond my grasp. I couldn't look at my old art with any happiness - I had just failed and looking at it again was kindof repulsive. I couldn't appreciate my progress because I was never satisfied.

So the thing that made me the happiest to create, made me the most discouraged as well.
I hated that.

But now I feel like, you know what, this is where I am. These are the techniques I know and I will do my best. I can look at better artists for inspiration but I'm not them. I have my own journey of progression. I can learn from their techniques and try them out, if they work for me that's awesome! I can practice them and improve. But my art and their art will never be exactly the same and that's the way it should be. I'm me. They are them. I'm here with my art and they are there with theirs. That's ok. If I put in my all, if I do my best, I will improve. I will progress. And if I'm accepting of myself and where I am but try to improve - I think I'll be able to look back at my old art with happy recollections because I did MY best.

While I was in Korea, my companion (the person I served with) told me this story. I don't remember it exactly but it helped me a lot. There was this actor on TV once who was talking about his acting career. He was super famous and was an awesome actor. When he started acting he'd had a idea to become a certain genre of actor but in the process of his career he'd become famous in a different genre. Because he had a gift for that other genre. He had a gift but because he still hung onto that other ideal he was never satisfied with his work and wasn't happy.
I heard that and at first I thought - "But he had this dream! He should never give up!" but after pondering it for a bit, I could relate. I would see some artist's work and want to become like them. But I was born with a different set of skills and style of my own. I fought who I was to become something else. I am good at something else and that's ok. I can become really good at my style or fight myself and become a watered down version of someone else. I can try to replicate something that isn't me or I can be inspired and apply what works to my style to improve it.

I hope that made sense But the point is that in the end I'm happy and I feel the discouragement and dissatisfaction disappearing. They have been replaced by satisfaction with where I am now and motivation and inspiration to improve.

I'm starting fresh. I hope you all enjoy what I post from now on, but at least I feel better knowing I will from now on. XD

-Jessie Kate