New Characters and Rough Story Ideas

About now in the project I got a bit worried that I was putting all my eggs in one basket, i.e. banking all my ideas on one pair of characters. So I decided to randomly doodle some ideas down. From this page below I really like the three legged alien.
These again are just some rough ideas for gags.

This is me riffing and bit on the alien. He wasn't quite there yet.
Again more random doodling.

I had recently seen the movie Surfs Up (I recommend this film) and I like the character of Chicken Joe. The kind of guy who takes life in his stride and nothing fazes him. I tried to get that into the alien.
A baboon in drag.
These two are roughly based on Frasier and Niles from Frasier. I thought it would be funny to have two really posh, refined characters doing really childish disgusting things.

Colour

These were the original colours I thought. A lot of classic characters, Goofy for example, are black. I wanted to give the Tall Guy blue feet like a bird. I didn't really like how this turned out, it lacks colour, I may also be construed as a bit racist.
Here was my second pass at colour. I had a set of twelve coloured pens to work from. Generally, the little guy is much lighter shades and the tall guy is much darker shades. This, I felt reflects their differing personalities more.
These are the final two colour choices. I like the first one, but I am a bit afraid the the little guy looks too much like a frog.
I like the little guy in this drawing, you do not get many orange characters. I don't really like the colour of the Tall Guy though.

Continuing Character Designs

Here are some more experiments i trying to find there personalities. I have given the Tall Guy a vest with pockets so he can put in his hands them. i saw Rodney do this a lot on Only Fools and I thought I should give it to him.
The Little Guy's hat maybe a bit big though. Here are some drawings to show how the little one is overconfident and a show-off and the tall one is nervous. How the little one uses him.
Of course how the ladies react to them is a big difference in their personalities.

This is trying to go Tex Avery extreme with them.

Tall Guy

Here's the other character, currently known as the Tall Guy. Again, if you go to
daryl-rhystaylor.blogspot.com,
you can trace his roots. The original quirk in his design is that he has one normal eye and one dot eye. I have tried to give him much more three-dimensional form. I have also tried to get that lanky, geeky, awkward look that Rodney has to him.


This is getting more like it. His legs are longer now, and his tall is longer thinner and droops on the floor.

The Little Guy- Earliest Designs

Here are some drawings of the character currently known as the Little Guy. Originally, I designed this character around Christmastime last year as an idea for my final third year film. I decided to use him now as I thought he fit. Actually, if you look back at
daryl-rhystaylor.blogspot.com
you can see the original designs and how it had altered to this point. Originally in the design, I thought it would be funny to have a character with no legs, hands or eyes. For a while it seemed to work, however it did put restrictions on the poses and expressions he could make. To make him more Tex Avery like, and because the lack of eyes creep some people out, I decided to add eyes, hands and legs in. These are some experiments to see how that would work.

I wanted to get that cocky Delboy, could charm anyone attitude into him, so I thought about given him Delboy's hat. Most of these poses are mimicking Del.

Research

All images were obtained from johnk.blogspot.com

I really wanted to capture a classic golden-age look to the characters so my first port of call was to find out how they were designed and constructed. I went to John K's blog because he has an extensive amount of articles on the subject.

What creates the feel of a character from this period is that characters are constructed to be never perfectly on model. Characters are designed with circles, pears and tubes. They are constructed out of soft curves. This gives the characters a three-dimensional feel. It also allows the animators to practice animation principles from them. Characters were design to allow the animators to squash and stretch the characters to create the expression they want. Use pears and spheres to create simple organic characters.

This knowledge has given me the freedom to push the shapes and not worry if the character is on model or not.

Here are some examples.

Here are a couple of scans from Preston Blairs book, from John K's blog.

Here are some drawings I have done based of of these.