Character invention

Our next exercise after processing was to create a character through original ideas and development. In the end, after much thought and discarded ideas I actually came up with something. If I had been given more time, it's hard to say whether I would have come up with something better or nothing more. What I came up with, was something that could probably have been developed a lot more if necessary, although I may also have just ditched that idea too.

What I had was a completed puzzle which came apart piece by piece to eventually form a different puzzle. There were a number of different images or patterns that the puzzle might make, with the simplest possibly just different colours. The pieces would rotate and move in different directions once they were disconnected and break apart if they collided.

We had to make a flip book of our character in action and because the pages are small and with so many to draw, I decided to just use a puzzle with only nine pieces and no specific pattern. Doing it like this meant that the book would portray my idea, without me having to go into too much time consuming detail and would also allow for further development.

Flip books take a long time to draw, as every new page has to have the same image. To do this properly I just used a light under a glass table so that the drawings could easily be traced to the correct size and shape. While this is very helpful, after having drawn the same image lots of times I started to get not so specific about the detail. Being a perfectionist, this is a big failure for me...

I found that if the pages where lined up together it was a lot harder to flick though them properly e.g pages would get stuck together which meant that not every would be shown. So instead when lining up that pages I moved each piece slightly higher/further up than the previous one. This gave it a sort of step like construction and made it a lot easier to flick through the pieces.

In this post is a video of my book. Not done nearly as well as would have been if I had had more time. The video is slightly blurred but it is still possible to see what is happening.