Old Project Roundup: Mysteriously Sporty Characters

Next project from down-the-back-of-my-sofa: an early-stage pitch I did last year, for some sporty characters. I can't go into much detail about this project, or the client, but here are some preliminary roughs which never got to see the light of day...

I was hoping to see these characters animated with a mixture of gloopy/fizzy CG and jerky traditional animation (for the facial expressions) and running, jumping and hurdling around live-action filmed environments, leaving colour and animation in their wake.

Except they didn't, because they fell over at the first hurdle and some other much shinier characters sprinted past them. Ah well.

Odosketch

While my mac is having its motherboard replaced, after burning out just after the warranty ran out (Thanks Apple) and I'm having no luck installing Cs3 onto a temporary machine due to its crazy DRM which won't let me run the software I paid a fortune for (Thanks Adobe) I've been looking around at what online creative tools there are to see if anything can help my predicament. Aviary looks like a real technological marvel and I'll probably try that for a while.

But, the big news is Odosketch. I love it. In many ways there isn't much to it, but that's the point, it's the way it forces restrictions on you. There's no eraser, limited colours, and you can't change the size of the drawing tools. Just like real life. It's exactly like when you're sitting on the train and you have to doodle in the margin of a discarded newspaper with an old biro because that's all you have. And of course that's also when you can do your best doodling.

Here's a couple I did earlier:





Full size versions here and here

Branson Pickle

I don't understand why so many of my doodles turn out looking like millionaire "playboy" Richard Branson. It's quite disturbing.

Especially with the absence of any clothes.

Unitard

I knew my latest episode of Grip Wrench needed a unicorn scene, so during the weekend started sketching some whilst sunbathing, which brought on much amusement from my lazing-around-in-the-sunshine companion. I couldn't see what was funny until she pointed out I drew my unicorns with the horn on the end of the nose, rather than on the forehead.

(the other unicorn on that page was drawn after being shown the error of my ways)

I'd never thought about this before, and had always drawn them that way. I must have been been the laughing stock of the Fantasy Arts Guild. I don't know if they have a Guild, but I expect they do, and spend many a fun-filled evening in the tavern ordering flagons of ale from the "barkeep" and taking turns with the Cloak of Invisibility(+3). I better make sure I don't draw my dwarves too tall or my dragons with fur or I'll get punched on the nose by invisible assailant smelling of Real Ale.

Anyway, thanks to her input I've managed to draw a proper Unicorn now. Here's the final result which I'm currently animating. Horses (and horses with mythical horns) are a nightmare to animate, but a nice challenge.

Funny how all girls, no matter if they are artistic or not, seem to be able to draw perfect horses, when its the one thing that most artists say are particularly hard to draw. I guess it comes from huge amounts of doodling in the back of school-books before discovering they were more interested in having a boy than a pony.