Ursula's Turnaround...

It's basic and very small for some reason but I know what she'll look like now which is great! Onwards to fine tuning and starting on the other characters! :P

Part 1 of Ursula's Turnaround...

It took a long time to do this as she's still a bit of a work in progress, also there are a few elements I'm sure I'll change later, but it's nice to see her as a line drawing. It's meant I can clearly see what needs work and what's working really nicely. Her crown of thorns is still unfinished and her roots need work but she's really starting to look the way I want to! Now for the other two angles :P

A Bit More of Ursula's Dress...

I needed to start working on the details of the dress and as I wanted her to look as though she's partly made from wood I thought I'd have a go at making my own texture and blending it in:

As you can see, it wasn't so successful. I then realised there was a quick tutorial in the new ImagineFX magazine on making gnarled bark in Photoshop and these are my results:

The bottom of the dress isn't great because I'm going to turn that into roots but I thought I'd include it so I can see the general shape. Generally though I think it's a good first attempt at creating my own bark texture. I'll work into it more as I go but it's a great starting point. My skills in painting my own textures are pretty low so I'm really happy with what I achieved. Onwards! :D

For Future Reference: Chun Hay Au Yeung...

I love these! They remind me of a combination of Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell and Transformers. Really gorgeous colours too!

Another Ursula Character Update...

I'm trying to concentrate on the dress details at the moment. It's looking soft and velvety but there's no real detail yet so that's what I'm going on to next!

Ursula Character Update...

From my skeletal drawings I decided to start fleshing her out and working on what shape she'd be and just generally trying to get to know the character better:

It's going well I think. Still a work in progress and it'll change a lot as I do more design work but I think it's a good start. Now to do more!

A Bit of Character Work...

The last 2 weeks have been a bit troublesome so there isn't much here but I think I'm back on the right track and excited again. I'm still doing a lot of skeletal work, I thought it would be a good idea to see what the more complicated characters would look like underneath, so I can understand how they'd work a bit better. They're not very accurate but they're a good start:

For Ursula's skeleton I used a few human reference images:

I'm still not sure whether she's more human than tree or vice versa but I thought I could have a look at her skeleton anyway. I think the spine on the third drawing is the most likely, but I'll elongate it a little more in Photoshop when I flesh it out. I also played around with giving her a ribcage and seeing how big it would be, the same for the pelvis too.  I think they'd both be inhumanly small but because of her skinny frame, they'd actually be quite pronounced.

I also thought I'd look at how her hands might be. I want them to be very long and thin so, as well as using the reference skeletons above, I looked at the skeletal hand of an aye-aye, a very peculiar looking animal:

The left is a copy of the aye-aye hand and the right is my interpretation of a more human version. I definitely want her hands to be this long and thin. As I mentioned earlier, they may become more plant orientated later but it's all very useful anyway!

To break it up a bit I thought I'd give a similar treatment to my dragon-man, who is yet to be named. To do this I used a collection of reference images including human, lizard, horse and snake skeletons:

Again, very rough but it's a nice basis to work from later. I'll elongate the neck in Photoshop but I think this is pretty much the shape he'd have. I couldn't quite decide on how many fingers and toes he'd have but I'm sure I'll decide when I start finalising his design.

After this I thought about a link that Phil had previously sent me, to do with the character workflow you should follow.  In it they mentioned making a spreadsheet with columns for certain aspects of your character's appearance or personality. As I'm getting to the stage where the characters need a final design, I thought this would be a great place to start and then visit as I work, to keep me from getting too sidetracked.
Traits Doc

The document is a little untidy as scribd didn't seem to like it much but it's definitely going to be useful, especially as I can update it as I work! All good stuff. Now, onwards! :D