Well, one year and one film later, I'm still tinkering with my leading lady's design in my sparce spare time. I've also gained some new influence, such as the design theroies and arguments from John Kricfalusi's blog, as well as a newfound love for classical dance like ballet. Actually, the latter is the extention of my oldfound love for thick dancer legs, but that's another story.Anyway, some of the things I've been changing is making the face less of a single unchanging shape and more of an expressive head that whole structure can change to reflect emotion but still be recognizable as belonging to that specific character. I'm also getting a good working formula on how Vivian's eyes and eyelashes work.
I'm still having trouble getting the hair to work as a completly working-3-demisional object, kind of like the problem the Bruce Timm Batman series had with the first Gordon design's cowlick, beofre completely redesigning the character for the later episodes by just giving him a crew-cut.
One thing I've begun doing as mentioned before is studying ballet performances. I began using gestures that I captured from a Nino Ananiashvili video I have to pose my character to better understand how motion and a dancer's anatomy works in these captavating performaces, as well as reviewing squash and stretch over the whole body.
Okay. The last gesture was from a belly dancer video I have. Sue me.
As you may have noticed by comparing these very recent sketches from the year-old turnaround back on top, Vivian has gone through some other changes. She's more round overall, her waist is more appropriate to her body type by being bigger (but not in that "Fast-Food Nation" type big), her arms are longer and more muscled as well as having actual pectoral muscles running from under her deltoids.
The reason I designed her some simply at first was that I had no confidence that I could pull of something more natural but still good for animation. But as I doing the animation, I found myself constantly breaking model by drawing more anatomy and shapes. I can't help it. I love doing good and expressive figure drawing. I felt pretty bad about it towards the end of the semester, but my teacher, Chuck Grieb, said there was nothing wrong with a character's design evolving during animation, and I liked the way my character was turning out. Below are some frames from that very film.
If there is to be another Vivian the Fairy film ( and now that I have a copy of Flash and the knowledge to use it, so possibilities are fair at the moment), expect changed models as well as a lot more nods to dance. I might even slug more with music and set the whole film as one big ballet. Just with half naked fairies and a whole lot of violent fighting.
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