Part 3: Exercise - Animal Farm

I was very excited to start this exercise, I knew I wanted to create a cute duck type character. I've been doing a lot of drawings of ducks for the other exercises and I'm really inspired by white ducks at the moment. I've been following some lovely duck accounts on Instagram which has inspired my work further.

I thought about how I could make my character look more human and decided to put him in dungarees. I've wanted a pair of Lucy and Yak dungarees for ages and have promised myself some next month. I love the ethical nature of the brand, the diversity and the elaborate colours and patterns they offer. My general style is a bit more subdued so I thought I'd put my character in simple polka dot dungarees.

Lucyandyak.com

This is my initial sketch, I was just doodling really and he just started to come together. I made him fluffy with a kawaii inspired face to make him extra cute. I've been researching the kawaii movement recently and learnt from Ilaria Ranauro's Domestika course about the Kawaii style facial features. I was so pleased with this little fellow I decided to colour him digitally to bring him to life. This was the first time on the degree that I've started to feel like the coursework is lining up more with my own personal art style. I used colours that I've developed over the years as my 'brand' colour palette and I really love how my character came out.

Once my sketch was complete, I decided to make him 3D so I could see what he looked like from different angles. I chose plasticine because I knew it wouldn't dry out and I could manipulate him into different movements and facial expressions.

I found these packs locally, unfortunately I couldn't get a bigger amount of the yellow so had to mix in other colours to get his shape right. I'd really like to make him out of air dry clay in the future.

I had a bit of trouble getting him to stand up because of his big belly, but managed it by putting in a cocktail stick support for his back and making his feet bigger.

Having this 3D model really helped me with the next stage of sketching him from different angles and different facial expressions.

I tried to sketch a range of emotions in his face and use different angles to help bring my character to life.

I really enjoyed doing these sketches and could have gone on to develop this character much further with other expressions, movements of the body etc. I would of created a proper 3D model with all the details as well. Unfortunately I needed to stop here to make time for the other exercises but I do hope to develop this character in later work.

This exercise was definitely my favourite so far of the course and I feel like I'm starting to connect more with where my work is headed.