Tia Whitehead - BA (Hons) Computer Animation Arts

Below are my sketches for my Diabetes monster after studying the Disney flour sack. At the moment I believe that the monster character is quite expressionless so I am going to try to draw him with different expressions. Although above I have tried to draw the monster in different positions which could help express his mood, such as lethargic and angry. After, I then decided to try drawing my character. I looked at three different images of me to see how differently I can look. I will continue to draw more of my character.

Disney flour sack research: After speaking to Alan today I was advised to look at the Disney flour sack character to help with designing and animating my Diabetes monster.  I find this concept easy to understand. It shows that even simple shapes can be animated and given character. While speaking to Alan we also discussed how small details can help suggest the character's personality.  Design influence research: Alan and I also spoke about how my animation would be designed. We spoke about my own style of artwork which I believe is similar to the Adventure Time and the animation design from Pictoplasma. Pictoplasma is an academy where talented students are able to attend to learn character design work. Each of the character designs are individual, meaning that they are very random. There is also a website called Pictfolio which allows for artists to display their contemporary character design work, some of which are detailed or graphically designed.  Pict

I decided to look further into the idea of creating a diabetes monster based on something that I dislike that is also related to diabetes. The two ideas that I came up with are blood and needles.  I then looked into the different styles/shapes of blood that I could use if I was to use the shaping for the character design.   

In life drawing today we were given two drawing opportunities. The first I chose was portraiture. I drew all of the portraiture drawings using my iPad. These first two drawings were 5 minutes long. These last two drawings were 10 minutes long. We did the portraiture activity for an hour and then moved onto a still life where we were given an hour to draw anything to do with the still life display that was in front of us, which is shown below: When I do still life exercises I usually like to draw the items as I can see them, but this time I decided to pick parts of the still life arrangement and draw them on random parts of the page. This page took me around half an hour to complete. Towards the end of the session I decided to draw the skeleton head. This took me around 7 minutes to complete.

After speaking about my character design with Alan, I was told to look at Inside Out and how they designed the shape of their characters around certain objects. In the film the character Riley is disgusted by broccoli which is one reason as to why Disgust (the emotion inside her head) is shaped similarly to a piece of broccoli. I was advised to look into this as a bit of research to help with my own character design which helped me stubble upon this by a blogger who attended a Disney Inside Out talk in 2015: 'The emotions were actually molded after things that sort of represented their feeling. So, for example, Disgust pretty much looks like broccoli..... Anger looks like a brick and Sadness looks like a teardrop. ... Joy looks a little different than the other emotions. She has a huge glow to her. She’s also a bit more complex. As you can see, every other emotion is pretty much all the same color – except for Joy. Joy’s hair is blue, her aura is blue, but her skin is yellow.

After speaking to Alan and Phil about what I had written as a rough script I was told to look at trying to personify diabetes as a character. I came up with some rough sketches which are shown below. I decided that I would look at the pancreas as a starting point as that is the organ that fails to work correctly in diabetics. I tried to incorporate the pancreas as a mouth in different characters. I then spoke to Alan who suggested looking at the shaping of the character and looking at how to personify diabetes more but drawing it as I believe to see it. I started off sketching basic shapes to see whether I could come up with any ideas. I then did a bit of research into diabetes monsters and found these two examples. Alan said to also consider how the monster would be attached to my character. Looking at these examples helped me to see how other people felt about having diabetes and I also related to the same 'ball and chain' feeling.                    

For my premise project I am very interested in creating an animation which is able to show my day to day life and struggles with having Type 1 Diabetes. After speaking to Alan and Phil, I was suggested creating a bubble map to help with finding out how I feel when my blood sugars are high and when they are low and how I feel in general about living with it. This is the bubble map that I came up with: From writing down these emotions, it helped me to understand myself and the characters that I am going to create for the project.

Figure 1. Movie poster Ethel and Ernest is film about a lady called Ethel and a man called Ernest who fall in love. The film starts showing Ethel working as a lady's maid who sees Ernest ride past on his bicycle everyday, each morning they start to wave to each other until one day Ernest knocks on the door and offers Ethel flowers, asking her whether she would go on a date with him to the cinema. The film then continues to show their life together and how they cope living throughout World War 2 in the United Kingdom. The film also shows the ups and downs in their life, from having a son to Ethel and Ernest eventually dying.  Figure 2. Ethel and Ernest's date The film had been created from one of Raymond Briggs' illustrative books which talks about the life of his Mother and Father and how he came to where he is today. Raymond Briggs is a popular illustrator who created the illustrations for The Snowman (1982) and Father Christmas (1973). Roger Mainwood took on t

Figure 1. Movie poster Belleville Rendez-Vous also known as The Triplets of Belleville is a silent French film about a young boy's dream to compete in the Tour de France. The film follows the boy as he grows to a man and shows him competing in the event although, while competing, he is taken by what turns out to be the French Mafia and is then used, along with other competitors, to be forced to cycle in a betting ring. In the film, the man's Grandmother is also shown. She is shown encouraging throughout his journey and supporting him while he was in the Tour de France. When she realises that her Grandson is missing, she and their dog Bruno go on a search to find him. When she follows the trail to Belleville she meets the triplets of Belleville who end up helping her retrieve her Grandson and defeat the Mafia. Figure 2. Ms Souza Although the film has hardly any narrative the noises of singing and music can be heard suggesting that the film is almost like a

All of these sketches were completed on my iPad. For the first few sketches I looked at using a graphite pencil tool. The longer we were given to draw the more time I used to draw using a water colour brush. These sketches were 10 minutes long. I then decided to sketch more using the graphite tool. I then decided to put all of the sketches into one drawing. I do not usually like this style but liked how the images were able to come together as one image but they are also able to be differentiated.