Betty final design and Waiter outfit concepts

 17/03/21

Now that we have handed in our proposal document I've been working on refining Bettys character design to make her feel really polished and final. I've also been working on doing character shape composition breakdowns to help me better understand how to draw these characters and how they may look in a 3D environment.

for the breakdown I used Bettys older design however most of her shape is still the same despite the tweaks we made to her hair. she's a very round and circular character so I feel like drawing her from all angles will be pretty easy. The main thing I want to come across is the puffiness of her skirt and hair.

Pavo's design I feel has a lot of squares and rectangles. Max has said his design needs to be finalised a bit more and to try think of him as more cylindrical so he doesn't look flat or unrealistic when we get to animating.

THe waiter I feel has the most cmplex design, which I feel will be the most difficult to draw from different angles. His shape composition is a mix of triangles and square shapes. I think with a bit more practice I could draw him a bit more reliably.

Several people in discord were discussing changing up Betty's scarf design, as this was a last minute detail added in for the proposal I thought it was a good idea to explore other options as I kinda went with the first design I came up with. I really liked the idea of having a scarf Frankenstein of different animal furs but in the end we decided the original design would work the best for the animation. 

Betty's colour pallette also went through some simplification., now thee is only 5 colours excluding white and black. When bettys mouth is open her inner mouth colour will be the colour of her hair and her tongue will be the colour of the scarf. 

Looking at the turnaround of Betty that I put together for the Proposal document, I wasn't happy with how her hair looked from the back. the 5th hair bump looked like it appears out of nowhere and looked really jarring, so I think getting rid of it and making her hair more evenly split and symmetrical with 4 bumps will look better and be easier to keep drawings accurate in the future. We also decided having the hair resting on Bettys shoulder as well as the new scarf made her neck area look a little too busy and cluttered, so I have removed the hair from her design.

Now that Bettys design has been pretty much finalised I wanted to start working on some illustrations and poses that could be used in the character bible. I wanted to take some time to study and emulate some expressions using Adventure time as a reference. I think the art style is very similar to what we've decided to use for Ugly Fish and has a lot of really detailed and overperformed expressions that I think could be utilised well. 

I decided to sketch out some poses and shots I  feel reflect the story and that might happen according to the story outline. I wanted to have a variety of poses, angles and mods to help reflect the full range of what betty will look like in the final animation. 

I sketched out some ideas in photoshop as I find the layout to be a bit faster to work n while sketching. after that I decided to export them into toon boom harmony to help refamiliarise myself with the software and t create a  vectorised illustration that could be resized if needed for the character bible format or for social media if needed. 

In class we also discussed how the very traditional looking French waiter is looking very out of place in a more casual/nautical themed restaurant. The main inspirations I took for the design was navy uniforms as well as taking inspiration for other nautical themed restaurant uniforms.