So this week I entered the Artstation.com 2D Character Art Challenge: The Journey, seen here.
The idea is to make the viewer care, in a single image, about an epic journey that your original character is about to embark on. So, my character is a chimpanzee named Tommy and his journey is a mission to the moon! 🙂
My story: “So Long, Tommy!”
A little boy is excited to see his pet chimpanzee, Tommy off on his journey to space. Tommy, however, is less than enthusiastic about his blastoff and is having second thoughts. He can be seen far off screaming out the window, desperately trying to abort the mission now that he understands what’s about to happen. The boy is oblivious to the chimp’s screams and waves enthusiastically, holding his stuffed chimp to comfort him in Tommy’s absence.
I started off with a moodboard to get an idea of where I wanted to go with this:
While this is definitely a daunting journey, I definitely wanted a humorous feel for the piece, especially highlighting Tommy’s horrified facial expression juxtaposed with the cute little boy’s oblivious excitement…
So here are my initial thumbnails for this scene: the difficult part is capturing the opposing moods of the boy and his pet chimp, since they are so far away from each other…
These were ok…
This one I liked, but not enough of the boy is captured to effectively communicate his mood…
This is the composition I liked the most, I’ll just have to use some good lighting to highlight Tommy’s face in the window, maybe tweaking some things here and there.
And a quick sketch of the chimp stuffed animal.
Now on to the boring (but necessary) stuff. In addition to filling many pages with lines and ellipses (yay!), I also filled some with some more perspective exercises from Scott Robertson’s How to Draw. My line quality is definitely getting better, as well as my understanding, even though I’ve done most of these exercises before. I’m just more focused this time.
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