Animal farm

Minnie Mouse, Danger Mouse, Tom and Jerry, Gromit, Watership Down, it’s often hard to name an animation which is about people rather than animals pretending to be people. The term anthropomorphism describes this process of superimposing human characteristics onto animals, and animation seems to do it a lot.

With this in mind, develop an animal character that is capable of showing a range of emotions, movements and reactions to different situations. Come up with extreme examples such as ecstatic or terrified; though you might also want to work with mildly pleased or startled, it’s much easier to work with stronger emotions first of all. Explore what these expressions might look like extended into the body – ecstatic and hopping, terrified and running, for example.

Develop a range of drawings showing your character from different angles, with different expressions and in different poses. You may want to develop some model-making as part of this exercise, using plasticine or exploring the options puppetry gives you.

This skillshare class by Australian children’s book illustrator Nina Rycroft was a good find to help with this task.

I chose a monster (which is an animal if you believe in monsters) I’m not sure of his name yet but it might be Keith.

Then again, is this monster a girl? She could be. Once I’d established the 3/4, front and side view, I did some very loose roughs to brainstorm poses and emotions. I didn’t have a system for the emotions I was going to portray, they just flowed along as I played with ideas.

Working up ideas – she’s starting to reveal her personality – I think this is what writers mean when characters write themselves?  The tail could be really expressive, and I experimented with the position in some poses.

I like the idea of her tail being in a knot when she’s sad.

As she is so friendly I don’t think her attempts at being scary would be anything other than silly. Maybe her tail would be jagged when she’s cross?

 

My Animal Character

3/4 view, front view, side view

Shy… Happy…(below)

Sad…Silly…Sneaking (above)

‘Scary’…Contented…Cross (below)

And here she is in colour.

Reflection:

I had fun exploring materials, using coloured pencil, felt tip and biro on green textured paper (cleaned up a little in photoshop). But I can now see it was overexposed during scanning, which I haven’t quite adjusted enough. I still find it difficult to finesse real-world artwork digitally – striking a balance between preserving a hand-drawn original and tidying effectively is tricky.

However, you can probably tell I LOVED doing this. I like the technical challenge of rotating a character (it’s quite hard, I’m sure it comes with practice.) Plus anything fun and character-driven transports me to a very happy place.

This exercise has shown me how much I like empathising with a character and exploring their personality. I hope to return to her or her friends in the future. I could look at developing characters perhaps as part of a narrative.

Update:

My tutor pointed out that I could push this further by having her crawling about, running jumping, sleeping, eating, shouting, yawning…picking her nose (OK, I added that one) Anyway. I hadn’t noticed that other than her silly grin, I haven’t moved her mouth or tongue! All good things to bare in mind when I’m developing a character next time.