Research for my new animation "The Choice" (Scene design & character design)

    Character Design:

    In successful animation making, character design plays indispensable role. I used to draw my own story and to create the main character by referring to photos, and I am quite happy with the realistic painting approach and the details which I could capture in my paintings. However, illustrations created in traditional way could be a step stone sometimes, since they leave limited room for viewers to rebuild their value beauty and the hard for illustrators to break through their own boundaries.

Realizing that I should keep trying and doing visual experiments, I begin to rethink of my character design in my previous work, and I understand it is necessary to create something new. Firstly, I began to draw reference from some good example and I found out that attractive and special character could be collage (mixture of faces and other things), could be abstract and distort portrait, could be incomplete portrait (for example, works from Deepa Vekaria), and could be something stimulate the viewers’ imagination, to be more concrete, viewers could only understand the characters’ feelings, emotions and ideological activities through the body language, the surroundings, the atmosphere and the colour. The works from Young Soo Kim and Jonathan Bartlett are able to encourage the imagination of the viewers.

               Deepa Vekaria: "I did it for you."

               http://www.deepavekaria.com/relationship3.html

                 Jonathan Bartlett:"Absurdist Logic"

                 http://www.seejbdraw.com/page2.html  

Scene Design:

When it comes to atmosphere construction, scene design plays the decisive role. In my earlier illustrations, I have already drawn from different angels and perspectives, which is similar to the viewfinder in film making. In order to further the practice in scene design, I began to look for some good examples. Since the scene in my latest mission relates to space, the designs I collect all show the illustrators’ thinking of Spatial composition.

Garrett Pruter’s works show his concern about the hidden space which is invisible, architecture is crucial element in his work. In his illustrations, the buildings are drawn in two different styles, abstract and realistic. The abstract patterns of buildings are created to depict the strange look of the hidden space, and the abstract buildings represent the real world which we experience every day.

              Garrett Pruter: one of the "Asylum" series

              http://www.garrettpruter.com/961071/ASYLUM