Out with the cat's and in with the Sloth's

So last time we wrapped up the sentry turret project and now its time to introduce the newest project assigned to us last week Thursday (which I only started late Monday due to overlapping projects). Without further ado I bring you the dichotomous duo character project...As you might already know I'm not a fan of humans and character projects are my most feared assignments but none the less I ploughed through this project in the beginning of the week to get ready for a presentation on Thursday; this wasn't easy and left me feeling exhausted due to not having a break after the sentry turret, but what are you gunna do? Anyway so I started off looking at a couple things on Pinterest and made a board full of cool inspirational pictures; of already created dichotomous characters, cool styles in which I would try and replicate and finally of course a hell of a lot of cute animals.

Inspiration Moodboard

Style Moodboard

Reference Moodboard

Opposite word board

As you can see on my reference board I added a load of sloth's and Emperor Tamarin's; at this point I also looked at how I could make my characters opposite so I looked into making them a king and a jester or a Victorian master and his butler. I also made a list of opposites so I could choose a couple to add to my characters traits later. So after coming up with a few ideas I rushed into doing some drawings so that I had some work to show for Thursdays presentation; in hindsight I should have spent more time worrying about iteration rather than the presentation. Here's what I came up with;

My initial ideas

I looked into a doing Mafia cats and a sheriff and bandit but decided to stick with my original king and jester because it was the most unique and I felt that It suited the animals and project better. After deciding on the sloth and tamarin I looked into different styles of drawing the characters and I also experimented with the Master and butler idea.

Style exploration

I decided to stick with my original style because I feel like it is the best design overall and fits my characters better than the others. I also stuck with my king and jester idea because the butler and master drawing wasn't as strong. 

More in-depth sketches

After deciding on the king and the jester I developed the characters a little further by looking at them as block shapes. I made the king very geometric and spikey whereas the jester is made of round shapes and curves; this is to portray their personalties and show their differences. I then went onto analyse their differences as shown below:

Characters personalities

After coming up with a general Idea of what I was doing I decided to go into doing some quick silhouettes to get some feedback on which design should be my final.

Silhouettes

After coming up with a final design I drew up a quick sketch for my presentation.

Final design

In my presentation I got some decent feedback telling me that I should go back to the silhouette stage which now means I am quite far behind. After getting this feedback from the tutors I went into looking at the circus, due to one of the tutors saying that the Emperor Tamarin would look good as a strong man.

Circus Moodboard

After making as quick moodboard I got straight into doing a few quick silhouettes and then some thumbnails; as shown below. 

Silhouettes and thumbs

I then got feedback on these thumbs and people liked them a lot more than the originals; next I took note of peoples feedback and put pairs together that they felt would look good. 

Second set of thumbs

After doing this stage people felt that 1, 6 and 8 were the strongest pairs; I still haven't decided on the final for the tamarin yet so I decided to start doing some more development for the sloth clown as shown below:

Sloth clown development

I decided to work on the sloth's face to see how I could make it look scary; due to me wanting to make the sloth a scary character that just wants to make people laugh and the tamarin a funny character that wants to make people scared, thus showing a clear dichotomy. I got feedback on this too and the two most popular are 5 and 6; I am probably going to go with 5 due to it not being as scary as 6 I want to keep it so that the sloth looks like he isn't trying to be scary on purpose. 

Overall I am now behind on this project due to the set back from the presentation but I should be ready to go in to modelling for Tuesday if not Wednesday, which gives me plenty of time to get the project finished in time for the deadline.
Cheerio for now...