Baku Designs

I decided to go for a more traditional representation of the Baku, but I incorporated tapir elements int he markings - which I adore. Elephant head, lion's mane, tapir body, tiger legs, plus tail.
The girl - I've taken her face shape and high eyebrows from examples of Asian art. I will also give her a very light skin tone, as in Asian paintings. I also plan to give her a flowing night-dress, as a lot of Japanese and Chinese paintings depict flowing clothing and fabric in quite a distinct way.

Creature Designs

I like the blank eye and the details around it. I love the ear. I like the high back and the small paws. I am not fond of the snout at all. I think it should be shorter. Quite creepy looking, which is good, as the story is a creepy one. Too creepy? I'm wondering if the eyes should be bigger?

 This version worked out very well, in my opinion. It is unique compared to the usual designs of the Tailypo creature. Combined features of a hyena, aardvark and alligator make a sort of bat-like appearance. I like the addition of the 'beard' on the chin, too. I will keep the hyena-style body with the high back and small hind quarters and then, obviously, a long tail. There is still potential to show the Cheshire Cat type grin with this design, but I'm planning on only showing that when the creature is about to attack near the end of the story. It was tempting to add antlers to the design, as in my rough sketch ont he original storyboard, but I decided this was too much.

 Colour test. Seeing if the method in the Copper tutorial works for my work. I was nervous about reducing hte lineart to purely black pixels with no anti aliasing, but it actually works quite well. Cross hatching complicates the process from what is described int he tutorial - it makes some areas impossible to select with the magic wand, but these can be painted seperately.

The Tailypo Creature

Above are the previous inspirations for the creature design in 'Tailypo' (the creature is never actually named as Tailypo, it is looking for it's tailypo. The creature has no name). I liked the Cheshire Cat grin on the black and white one, by SelfRightousSuiside and the blank eyes. I also loved the designs by TurtleShelltered, as they deviate from the usual portrayals of the Tailypo creature, and have large, round glowing eyes. They are the only designs I have come across that don't look roughly the same as every other design (like the first image here, by Michael Wandelmaier.)

I would prefer to be original in my designs of the creature, like TurtleShelltered, rather than offer up a version of the over-used design. Including a Cheshire Cat-style grin could potentially look amazing.
 

 

Above: The Cheshire Cat from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, and a sketch by Joshua Kenfield. I love the blue glowing eyes of the cat, and the really wide grin. It is quite subtly creepy. What I love about the sketch is the side-view, showing how far back the grin pulls the face. It is creepier than the front view.

 Style-wise, I love this piece by Viktor Miller-Gausa. The hatching is an effective method of shading the fur, leaving areas white for the highlights. The ears of the hares fit in well with designs for the Tailypo creature, and I love the way he has drawn the limbs.

As for my design of the creature, I will look back on my observation drawings from the Natural History Museum in Oxford. I will take pieces of various animals and 'stitch them together' to create one.

 

 I have picked out these particular pages for the elements of animals I will potentially use. I like the armadillo's body - I think it would be really interesting to draw as part of an unusual creature, and would offer an amazing pattern and texture for the scenes in which the creature appears. I like the ears of the hare, the hyena and the aardvark. The alligator's jaws would make a menacing mouth, and I like that a few teeth poke through or hang over the jaws. I like the body and markings of the hyena, with the high back, and the general face shape, and I like the paws and head of the fox.

I have tried copy-pasting various elements in Photoshop to inspire my creature designs.

Just a little bit... STRANGE.

I actually quite like the combination of the hyena and alligator! The ears are cute, though if I were to keep them I would have to change the proportions. The creature is often described and drawn as having very long ears, and I really like the effect in Viktor Miller-Gausa'a work above.

More Tailypo Character Designing

 

The face that worked well.

 I tried to tweak the style a little bit to see if I could come up with any results that I like, and that more suit the image I have in my head for the other outcomes. The first one looks... psychotic. But I liked the effect of circling the eyes for deep shadows, making him look tired and older. The second attempt came out very well. I like the proportion of the eyes to the head - if rounded eyes get too big they look very manga-ish, which isn't what I'm going for at all. The big nose suits him. He looks vaguely terrified, which is suitable too.
 

Here I was trying out shading with cross hatching and block shading. I like how the cross hatching experiment came out - it allows me to show more contours of his face without adding too many extra detailing lines, which would make him look far too old, and the face more complicated and harder to read. The block shading and cross hatching one works, but I don't think I would like to do an entire comic with it. I think it would work well for scenes with a prominent light source, for example cooking the rabbit on a fire, or scenes with high emotion, like when he is scared of the creature.

Facial hair style! The shape of the first beard is inspired by pieces by Charlene le Scanff. I think it works really well witht he style of the face. More detail can be added within the lines of the beard (I always love detail). The second one, as you may be able to tell by the fact it is not even finished, does not work so well in my opinion. I think it would have worked with the original styling of the face, but the way I have drawn it now, which I intend to keep, doesn't suit it. I might be able to combine the two: have the shape of the first one with the detailing of the second.

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