MORE Direction! :D

This week i had a group 'crit' session. This was basically a gathering of other Ma students and teachers where i presented work i have been doing and my current ideas and direction.
After this discussion suggestions and comments where made all of which helpful and encouraging, but one idea seemed to stick with us all.

We all decided that my T-Rex/Elephant combo was a great start but we wanted more crazy creatures! I talked about my idea of this creature having a tree/plant growing from its muscular back, which was great and then it hit us...

'What about another world living on its back filled with crazy creatures of all forms, with their own individual characteristics for survival?!'

So the T-Rex/Elephant acts as the planet on which others live. This in mind i have added below a quick rough sketch of what this could look like.

Another Direction

Still keeping in the Creature Design theme, but with inspiration form my previous posts, i have thought about taking an existing skeleton of an animal but developing a new creature from it.

So the skeleton of the animal remains the same but the exterior is different to what people would expect.

Above is an example of what i have worked on today, i started with an image of a Deer skeleton and then built on it to create a new creature. It is still recogniseable as a deer but the steriotypical bouncy cute deer has clearly been lost as this new creature has an evil scary feel to it and looks swamp like.
Its structure is very slim with bones showing and the joints clearly visible.
This was a quick design and i may take this further into a more detailed creature later.

More Experimentation

This was another quick experiment, but this time i did the opposite to what i have done below, i have taken an existing creature from a film and tried to imagine how its skeletal structure would look.

Learning More!

I have found this technique to be very beneficial when trying to get to grips with a creature/animal! I have also really enjoyed this experiment and will apply this in future to get a feel for a character, as i feel i am learning basic positioning of a creatures structure - where the bones appear just below the surface of the skin and how the muscles look.
Most importantly i have learnt to be able to fill in the gaps- from the shape of the skeleton i have been able to work out where the muscles connect and how the overall shape of the creature joins together.
I am really pleased with the second of the two images as i feel i have managed to keep the energy in the creature.

Photograph Progression

After my previous post, i decided to take the idea of developing on skeletons but this time loosely painting the actual body of that animal over the skeleton. In this case i have used an African Elephant.

This experiment has turned out to be really useful in working out where the joints are and how the skin and muscles sit on the skeletal frame. I think this is a great way for me to develop a feel for the animal.

Using the skeleton as a base i can define the animals features exactly to the shape of the skeleton. I really like this technique and feel it is an excellent way for me to develop a feel for an animal and helps me understand what parts of its body move and how.

Experimenting with Photographs

Following my visit to the Natural History Museum in Manchester i took one of my T-Rex photographs and played around highlighting areas of the skeleton to enhance the image and make it look more personalised. This was a useful experiment to gather a basic feel for bone shape and structure.

The Great Manchester Mission!

On Friday 7th October 2011 myself and fellow MA crew members headed out towards Manchester for a day of sight seeing, inspiration gathering and research collecting. I was excited for what the day may reveal, that was until myself and several others arrived in Manchester Piccadilly at 11.15am (the meeting point decided by teachers) to find... know body, in fact we had been abandoned... GREAT we thought!

After Trekking at speed to catch up we eventually spotted the 10 minute earlier train load in the distance. Struggling to keep up we lost sight... luckily one of our group spotted them dive into a building. At this point as you can imagine we where rather fed up (as this was a uni 'organised' trip)... we didn't get the opportunity to decide which of the two tours hosted by two different teachers, of Manchester's attractions we wanted to visit as one group had already done one!

So rather down hearted we finally caught up to this group in the Manchester Art Gallery at 11.50am, to be told we only had till 12.10pm to get round the whole gallery before she moved on... us three Games Designers thought SOD THAT, so decided to embark on our own adventure of Manchester, and what a brilliant day it turned out to be!

We spent at least an hour in the Manchester Art Gallery, all three of us finding relating things to our individual project directions, which of course was fantastic! I myself discovered all sorts of different animal related pieces which i have wrote about in my Research Section of this Blog.

After, we headed out into Manchester armed with only a Map (as non of us had a knowledge of Manchester) and our Cameras. What a busy day we had, in fact we trekked all over Manchester visiting;
    1. Manchester Town Hall
    2. A well deserved glass of wine/beer and a plate full of glorious food in the Weather Spoons Pub
    3. On to the Peoples History Museum
    4. Down to the MOSI - Museum of Science & Industry, visiting the 1830 Warehouse, and across to the Air and Space Hall (which was AWESOME!)
    5. Finally heading back to the city centre and visited the Magma book store and the Travelling Man store.

After an extremely tiring museum filled day it was safe to say we were shattered! But we came to the conclusion we had had a better day than we would have had with the teachers, as we where free to explore what we wanted with no time restraints, so in the end the bad start worked in our favour, eventually leaving Manchester at 7.15pm!

We slept well that night!