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Thursday 17 October 2013

Pre-Production: "Barnabas" Experimentation

Hello Everyone,

Its a late one but only because I had to get all of this stuff out of various sketch books as I have been drawing absolutely everywhere over the last few days. My exploits began in my IPAD as I am ever vigilant that doodling on a mobile digital medium is the bomb. That being said it was significantly quicker once I got back to my sketchbook and started firing out lots of quick ideas. I used a caricature book to study certain nose types and facial types. This made me consider a number of ideas for Barnabas drawing a little inspiration from Sammy's Original...

I will warn everyone now that a lot of these sketches make Barnabas younger then Sammy's original I guess I was going for a younger father figure but if not some could be adapted for the child Barnabas... That's if any of them are liked... I just wanted to have a little play with the character (hence why this is called Experimentation). I get that my style is vastly different from this project that being said I still would like to have some influence over the features... I do that best in the free hand sketch medium so I did lots of doodles and have posted my favourites below!

Enjoy the doodles and please let me know if any jump out!


The image above shows 6 facial tests that I conducted on the IPAD. I just wanted to play with features here, I wanted to see what would happen if I made the head bigger, made the eyes smaller. Shrank the head, strengthened the chin, weakened the chin, etc, etc. I didn't want to give up with just some basic ideas. I didn't start trying to change the nose significantly because I kind of liked the thinner nose... Still I explored the alternate in the next row of sketches and found something I liked even more... If I'm honest I liked E but that would only work as a child... Note the size of the head and eyes!

At this point my IPAD ran out of juice which was probably a blessing as the few I had done took a considerable amount of time. When I sat back down at the old sketchbook I just kept firing out head after head. I knocked up A, B, C and found myself getting bored... When I dredged up D I liked the chin but the mouth felt wrong. E was my shining moment... I like the face but again it may be too young. After that I tried a number of expressions (F, G, H & I) before going back to explore a few other faces after... Of all of these I love E but again it might be the wrong age...

Next I told myself it was important to work out a few things from my lovely Dummy models so I went to our Barnabas form and checked out his profile... I printed it out and then worked out how many heads go into his body. His proportions being what they are he currently has 10. 5 heads in his entire frame. The legs get an extra .5 over the upper body but essentially they follow Riven Phoenix's 8 head rule just elongated a little more... This was appropriate for my next step into the process... I wanted to start drawing his entire body... So I did some more figuring...


I knocked up the blueprint for Barnabas working out each of his features to his head... I worked out his arm to be 4.5 heads from the shoulder joint. I may have to double check that but everything else is accurate. His upper body (Head - Pelvis) is 5 heads leaving his lower a little longer. After doing that I broke the body down into primitives and tried to knock up a little clothed form test sketch. I didn't do too bad for a 5 minute job... The proportions are slightly incorrect but It really does show how he will be looking in a costume (or at least how his form will be looking...)

I will probably do something similar for the other 3 main characters (that will become 3D models).. As I have mentioned in the past the models have to be grounded in 3D this means that their proportions have to adhere to gravity and human form to some degree. The 2D characters in our short will be able to be more free form as they are on planes and do not physically exist in a third dimension... Everyone gets this I'm just stating it for the record here.. I don't want to be modelling characters that would fall flat anatomically if they existed in 3D.

Anyway I'll catcha later!!
xXStItChXx

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