Backgrounds and Characters

I decided to use acrylics for the final designs of my backgrounds and characters. This is because its easier to get a vibrant colour compared to other materials such as water colour or coloured pencil. I wanted quite a crisp feel to it all with both the backgrounds and characters bright, however I still wanted it to be easy to distinguish between the two. To do this I outlined some of the characters with a black fine liner.

These are my painted up versions of my characters. I Have decided to keep the fortune teller as she is and have made the Doctor look slightly older.

This is the fortune tellers room. I decided to use a lot of red and gold in this scene because they are very popular colours in China. I tried to stick to the description of the room in the script, but I added some traditional ornaments. These hint at the fact she is in a higher class from the market folk.


This is a long pan down of an alley with the market down below. I found it difficult deciding how I wanted to paint the pagodas. I settled on just painting the silhouette of each one in different shades of grey. For the objects on the market stalls I wanted bright exotic colours so I used purples, greens and reds.

A Load of Rubbish, in a Good Way

For the the third year project I am working on Adam's project 'Stress Fest' and I've been assigned the task of texturing some of the models as I can't model very well. Matt and Simon are modelling and also doing some texturing. I will need to learn how to UV unwrap to help speed things up.

I have been asked to create some textures for some festival bins, Adam gave me a rough idea what he wanted with some research photos and some examples of his own.



These are my first attempts, Adam wanted them a bit more rough looking which I agreed with. So I went back to my designs and used a grunge brush to beat them up a bit.


I now need to design a couple more to make the total different designs up to 8. And also the blue stripy bin I'm not very happy with so I may revisit the design of that one too.

More Character Design!

I think the main character design I need to work on is the fortune teller. I talked to a group of people and they suggested I made her more grotty looking.

Character Design: Donna

These are my initial ideas for my characters. I plan to develop a couple of them further and maybe try some different materials.

More Style Ideas...

I have been trying to find some more styles to draw my characters in and I came across some of these pictures... (All Chinese)

This is a cover for a Chinese cartoon called the 'Monkey King'.
This beautiful watercolour is by Ayaya. I really like it because all of thcolours beed together, and are only seperated by the black outline. I think I will try out this style.

This is another Chinese cartoon DVD cover.

Style...

I have decided that I am going to use the Chino planet script for my project. I was searching for inspiration for my style when I came across this painting by Chen Chun Zhong. I really like its effective simplicity and its use of silhouettes. I think I will try this style for my concept and characters.

Design Research

It was quite fun wondering around the Woodlane library completely lost... trying to find a book that is related to the scripts. I was working in a group with Jenny, Lucy and Leki. This is probably a very good thing because Jenny is very organised, which in turn helped me to be more organised.

We wanted to stick to the scripts and research what we needed. So firstly we had to read the beginning sections of each piece and choose where up to in the script we were going to look into further. We also did simple thumbnails to decide what else we would need to include and the different angles. We didn't really look very deeply into the history/information side of things which helped to keep our ideas a bit wild.

Here's some of my contribution to the research:

This is the Titanic script. I was working on the costumes for this one and I found a really useful website full of 1910s/20s fashion. I also looked more modern suits for the Doctor.

This is the research for the Chinese style planet and for London pubs/buildings. I really like the market stalls because they are so bright and detailed. I also like the idea of having a really long pan down at the beginning, it helps to set the scene very well.

I found the Lois XV script and interesting one to research for props because of the amazing decorative style they used. Everything that could have gold and fancy detailing, did.

Finding a landscape for Shakespearean London was the hardest one to look for. However, it's a strange thought that the houses used to line the bridges.

Finding outfits from the time of Pompeii was very difficult. I found the best way was to look at the frescoes preserved in the ruins.