development sketches of Kara

Here are some development sketches of Kara, from pen sketch to digital.

The look I was aiming for is captured better in the sketch on the left.  I wanted the first shot to encapsulate a look of sadness and weariness, but with a small hint of defiance.  The sketch on the right looks too defiant.

I then went into Flash to digitise the sketches.  Wasn't over enamoured with either of the drawings and so I then scanned in the original sketch above and am going to try to draw over this in Illustrator to see if it is an improvement over the Flash drawings.

I will see how the Illustrator drawings look and then decide on what software to use to draw the characters in.  I'm currently thinking of keeping the characters within the main scene black and white, with just one accent colour.

 

Tutorial, work & character development

Yesterday, I went for a tutorial with Alan and he seemed to like the concept, but urged me to crack on and get the practical work done as time is running out!   He has always been a great motivator for me, so I must take heed!  It has continuously been an infernal struggle for me to focus less on the work for my job, as it is oh so consuming.  This year, I have felt as if it has gobbled me up & spat out some menial remains that are worthless to anyone, especially me!    I would call my job a total energy and brain drainer this year and I am struggling to find some reserve energy from somewhere.  I worked into my summer break to finish the FE marking and to help students who had not completed their work and then for the last week and a half, have dived into the final module... but I am anxious about how little time I have now.  It didn't help today that the course leader for the Fda Animation course came round to my house to have a marking day for the re-sits.  We spent the day marking the re-sit modules and also completing the verification of each others marking.  We then had to sort out the induction week timetables for the FE and HE - and this highlighted to me that induction week is the same week as my hand in....  Also, this dragged me back into work mode, when I had been struggling so hard to push it to the back of my mind, rather than the forefront!

Enough whinging!  Prior to the last few days I have been sketching out the main characters, but I am finding it difficult to decide on which ones to go with and on asking other peoples opinions, no-one has agreed on the same one!  I have scanned in some of the sketches below.

 
I tried to simplify the character for Kara, but feel that the simplified sketches look too young and not appropriate for my target audience.

Bez - robocat

Above are some of the robocat sketches.  I have decided to call him Bez, which is a name derived from the Egyptian God: Bes, who is a God of home protection, who always protected women and children above all others; which I thought was quite appropriate.  I think that I may have gone a bit too far with the egyptian theme with some of them though. I will choose two and then digitise them in Flash and see how they look in the environments that I have created, I'm sure that will help me to decide.  (The lovely egyptian cat emblem at the top right of the second page of the cat sketches was copied from google images by the way - that isn't part of my character development).