Skills Showcases.

Skills Showcase - Character Turnaround

Character Prompt:

A wacky human who is average height and skinny, with medium, wavy purple hair, hazel eyes, a pale skin tone, and a crooked nose. They love painting. They want to write a book but are afraid of flying.

Sketches

Description

This project demonstrates my current skills in digital media design. The target audience for this character was teens and young adults who enjoy art/are very creative, and younger aspiring artists who may see their future selves in a wacky, colorful artist character. This project was completed over one week (approximately 30 hours). I used asymmetrical balance and colors that went well together in order to show my ability to use design principles in my works. I identified my target audience and created the design and personality with it in mind.

One challenge I faced was figuring out how to make the 3/4th perspectives for the gif and the dynamic poses for the main drawings. I overcame that by using a good amount of references, while refining 3/4 view perspectives. In the end, the results were successful, and the dynamic poses looked great, in my opinion.

Maintaining objectivity during extended work sessions was a challenge. I had been staring at it for too long, and thought it looked bad, despite the reassurance that most others liked the design when shown to them. Taking breaks helped me reassess the work with a fresh perspective, and I started to like it more when I came back from these breaks. This served as a reminder that my own work isn’t always gonna look good to me, and I will probably notice all the tiny details and mistakes that the majority of others wouldn’t notice, and that I just have to push through and complete the piece. Overall, in the end, I was proud of the finished work and it gave me new ideas to add to my art style.

Skills Showcase - Anxiety PSA

For this project, I was given 30 hours to make a PSA about either anti-bullying, mental health awareness, or an environmental issue. I wanted it to have more of a personal meaning, so I chose to make it an anxiety PSA. I made it using my character, Coffi, and a character I made based off of September, Tembs.

From the beginning, I knew I wanted it to look like the type of PSA you would see in school about 10 years ago. I took a lot of inspiration from the D.A.R.E. campaign when coming up with the concept, while still keeping my cartoon style in it, and using cartoon animals in order to catch peoples attention.

I started off by creating rough concepts of characters, with the one to the left being my previously made character, Coffi, the middle being a character based off of the one acting them, Tembs, and the one on the right originally made for a scene that I ended up not making, the mom I never named.

In order to save time with the amount of time I had to complete the project, for the character I was voicing, I used a character I already had instead of making a whole new character for them, so I would only have to make 2 new characters.

If anyone wants to know, Coffi is a roe deer, Tembs is an albino raccoon, and the mom is a melanistic raccoon. Although being based off of real animals, I took some creative liberties when designing the colors of each character.

when I finished making the characters, I made the background, made to look like a high school hallway, based off of the school I went to.

After getting the character concepts down and drawing the background, I moved onto the script. I already had a general idea down, so I did the research needed, got the resources, and typed up the script.

When I was finished writing the script, I started sketching out the storyboard, and recorded my lines. when sketching the storyboard, I failed to realize how long it would take, and started falling behind. I started working on it at home, to avoid getting too behind, and stay in my time limit.

Final Result

After getting the storyboard down and getting confirmation, I started animating. I used Photoshop to draw out the frames, and After Effects to animate them. while drawing out the frames, at some point in the process we lost internet in the middle of the day, and both After Effects and Photoshop crashed while I was at lunch, before I had saved. Luckily, I happened to have already exported the frames that were lost, and I was able to just import them back into Photoshop and after effects to finish animating, and all that was left is to get Tembs’ voice lines and line them up into the animation.

In the end, I had a result I was happy with, and completed it (mostly) on time. It ended up pretty much exactly as I envisioned it, and had a message that meant a lot to me.

Credit to September Dunn for voicing the Tembs character, and letting me base a cartoon raccoon off of them for the design.