APW: Designing Practically

Since we are getting the opportunity to do some molding soon, I thought that it might be fun to combine one of my briefs with that, which shows how my designs could translate into a physical options, and how much they do work in the real world as opposed to just 2D space.

The main thing I need to think about for this is keeping it simple - I don't have the time, and probably not the skill to make something overly complicated, so my initial thought was to look at some designs in 'Cartoon Animation' by Preston Blair. Going for something as simplistic and stylised as this also makes it a lot easier to animate the character which isn't what I am doing for this project but it would be great to have a library of my own characters to animate when I do have some spare time and want to try my hand at properly learning character animation.

I am going to make the design fit the Animation Portfolio Workshop brief which is extremely open, so I can design anything I want as long as there is a turnaround, expression sheet, pose sheet etc by the end of it. My initial thought was maybe to use this as a chance to design some mythical creatures in an easy to animate style, but I might not necessarily be able to mold them, so I will start off smaller - whatever character I design/mold for this could still be a part of that cast anyway, but as the one central human character, maybe.

Obviously I don't want to just use the exact same style as Blair, and if that is my only influence then it could end up going that way, so I made a pinterest board to collect some other examples to help me figure out my design.