The making of; Mrs Shoug Puppet - Heads & Tails

Here are the sheets that explain how I made the tails and head of Mrs Shoug...

The making of; Mrs Shoug Puppet - Armature & Body

Here are the sheets that explain each of the processes I went through to create the armature for inside of the puppet and making the body...

Armature Planning & Mrs Shoug Maquette

Now I have to get my making hat on! Lots of things to make, with a big range of materials! Here are a couple of my planning sheets of how I am going to go about starting to make the puppet and also some photos of a maquette that I made in a day to use as reference for the puppet.  

So after deciding (finally!) how I will be going about making the armature which would allow me to involve a replaceable tail for movement, I decided to make a maquette to help me get a 3D view of Mrs Shoug, here are the final images of that...

Now onto making the final puppet...

"Every child is an artist, the problem is how we remain an artist when we grow up." - Pablo Picasso

It's the start of second year! After two small projects to ease us gently back into the chaos of Uni projects, we got a project titled; "Minor Project - Character Performance."

We were each given a drawing of a character by a child that they had designed whilst listening to a specific sound clip. Shannon did a great character design which I was assigned. We each then had to re-design our given character, keeping as close to the original as possible! Here's Shannon's Mrs Shoug character...

Using this as my starting point, I did a lot of development and initial concepts of how to go about creating my final character design. I also did some research into existing slug characters in animation just to start looking into how I would go about creating poses, movement and different facial expressions.

After a lot of development I came up with my final design of Shannon's character... 

This was my final design for Mrs Shoug I kept with the colour scheme that Shannon had decided on, gave more detailing to the labcoat with two pockets, added more of a style to the glasses using red beads in the glasses and emphasised her hair style. I exaggerated her jowls to give more of an elderly look to the character as the sound clip suggests an older womans voice. I gave my character arms also as it would be hard to create a character with posing and expressions without arms or legs, just a tail. 

Here are two sheets of expressions and poses that helped bring the character to a life!

For the next project I have to make this character as a working puppet complete with a set and props! More posts to follow...

Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh my!

I thought I'd celebrate the end of first year by doing a blog post showing some sketches animals and birds - my favourite type of life drawing!

For our second visual studies project we had a section on drawing animals & birds, which I thought was amazing as I took trips to Perriswood Falconry, Cardiff Museum, Bristol Zoo & Folly Farm to do some observational studies. Win win, it's all work!

"Toucan Play At This Game"

Quick studies in black fineliner, pencil sketches, pen and washes, watercolour and coloured pencil studies.

"Cows make noise only when they're in the mood"

Studies in acrylic and watercolour paints, fineliner pen sketches, soft pastels, studies on coloured paper, etc.