Initial "Tailypo" Character Designs

These are my intial sketches for the man in the Tailypo tale. My thoughts were that he lives in the woods, secluded, so he could have a certain stereotypical lumberjack-ish style to him - facial hair, muscular arms, clothing: plaid shirt, jeans, boots. I imagined him being middle-aged to old, so he should have a few lines on his face. His motivation in the story is that he is hungry, and food is scarce, so he should be thin. It will be quite difficult to balance 'thin' with 'muscular arms'. Brings to mind one of the common character shapes in animation - large chest and tiny legs. Since he is both aging and hungry, he should look tired. I figured since in the story he lives alone in a secluded wood, and rarely goes to a town, he would not care about his appearance, so he would appear untidy.


I wanted him to have very rounded eyes, and I used the pupil style of the Fleischer animations. I will try out the rounded simplified limbs of the Fleischer animations too, but I am not sure how well they will work. I prefer the larger, rounded and simplified ears to my shoddy attempt to draw a some-what realistic on on Face 1. I have not yet decided between a full beard and mutton chops. I like that the mutton chops allow me to draw some stubble, too, and they wouldn't cover up the mouth, which offers some clues as to emotion. However, all the emotional cues being centrered around the eyes and eyebrows might be an effective solution too.

I think Face 1 looks a little too old-man-ish, and Face 3 looks a little hill-billy-ish, so I would like to aim for a middle ground between them.

 I like this face (above) a lot more, and it works in the side view too, which makes me happy. I think the full beard actually does work well, leaving all emotional cues around the eyes. He should have big, obvious eyebrows for this. I might still play around with style, but I am quite happy with this.
Body type: Doing limbs inspired by the Fleischer animations doesn't work well with muscular arms and a small body. I've never thought they looked good even on the muscular Fleischer characters, so my woodsman may have to be skinny all over (top left). Here, the simplified curvy limbs inspired by Fleischer do work well.

I also looked back at some of my artist research to this piece by Tyson Murphy, where his character has huge arms but a tiny body, and tried something like it above (bottom right). I don't mind this outcome - it needs more work - and it works well in Tyson Murphy's piece, but I think I might save using that body type for if and when I get around to doing some of the lumberjack folklore.

Come to think of it, clothing-wise Tyson's character is appropriate too. A quick image search for Lumberjack yielded almost entirely the image of facial hair, a red plaid shirt, jeans and boots.

He's a lumberjack and he's okay