Exercise 3.5

Animal farm

Develop an animal character that is capable of showing a range of emotions, movements and reaction to different situations. Come up with extreme examples such as ecstatic or terrified; though you might want to work with middle pleased or startled, it’s much easier to work with stronger emotions first of all. Explore what these emotions would look like extended into the body – ecstatic and hoping, terrified and running for example.

Develop a range of drawings showing your character from different angles, with different expressions and in different poses.

Approach

I wanted to work on an animal I hadn’t drawn before to really push my drawing skills. So I started with a spider diagram of the one’s not drawn yet, then went from there.

Research

I researched some characters drawn by Axel Scheffler, and how he developed his characters for the Gruffalo.

Here has has just roughly sketched some expressions of the Gruffalo, angry, shouting, fed up, and snide.

Also some facial expressions for mouse, smiling, sad, listening and angry.

Here is the Gruffalo in different body positions.

The Gruffalo standing in black and white and colour.

Some more sketches of mouse with full body, some of snake and fox too.

Character design

I narrowed down the animal I wanted too :-

Sheep

Llama

Alpaca

Beaver

I decided to go with the Llama just because they seemed to be quite animated from the pictures I have seen, they have expressive faces and are quite funny.

My character Lenny the Llama:-

Facial expressions

I did a list of expressions that I thought would work well:-

Smiling

Grumpy

Angry

Amused

Inquisitive

Into the body

I then went on to make the body react to the expression, but I did want to keep it fairly natural, not like a cartoon Llama where they could be skateboarding or something!

So this is for the Llama smiling:-

This is for the amused Llama ‘Lenny’:-

Then Lenny being grumpy:-

Lenny being inquisitive:-

And Lenny being angry and running:-

I then went on to work on the Angry expression a bit more, and to try and get it to look like he’s running a bit more.

I worked on the lines on the face, made the eyes wider, and added some eyebrows in to make him look more stern.

Reflections

What went well

I was pleased with this exercise and enjoyed doing it, it gave me more confidence in creating characters, I liked working on the facial expressions, and enjoyed creating the personality of Lenny.

I liked thinking about how the expression would change his features, ears, eyes, and face shape.

I wanted to keep him simple, with simple lines and not too much image description and details.

What I could do differently/ better

If I had more time I would have expanded further on more expressions and body types, but it’s something I can work on in spare moments. or five min sketches myself to practise further.