Final Face Iterations

After going through my feedback asking for opinions on my characters facial features, there were some points that I chose to follow but there were a few choices where it was too sporadic to make a final decision so I went with gut instinct and these are the results.

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Pear of Anguish: I wanted to have cogs on the face but I really couldn't make it work from the front so I went with the metal strips, if I wanted to go with the final piece having the mouth open the metal strips would work better and show more than a mask or cogs would let. (I'm still a little iffy about the final look I think I need to add a pinker cheek and a brighter red as the face is so white, there will be a powedered wig aswell so I'll have to play around with colours as I create hair.)

Iron Maiden: The results were fairly varied with this one so I went with a combination of my two favourites, I really loved the headpiece on this 5th one I created but I didn't think it felt too Iron Maiden-like, this has the spikes and a piece of fabric to play with the medieval clothing. I asked for people who were claustrophobic to give their opinions on having the eyes showing and a friend, Harriet, said she could see the terror in the eyes and the feeling of being trapped so I went with the eyes showing.

Rat Torture: I went with my friend Maxine's opinion most with this character as she suffers really badly from tryphophobia, she said that the red bites worked better than the buboes unless there were more of them, so I added the buboes to the neck and combined two to create the final image. I love the black eye and done this to play off the merging of the rats and the female and adds to her rattish look.

The next stage now I have my faces is hair for the rat and pear ladies and then clothing. I want to experiment a bit with lighting to maximise the creep factor, I have a thing with my style where I shy away from harsh shading as I'm always worried about making my work messy.

Anatomy Post 2

I completely forgot to upload the anatomy workshop images I took of the progress I am making with my model. We've had our last anatomy lecture now and I'm really going to miss them, I've learnt so much and Ron has been an amazing tutor, however we still have the model to finish and we'll be working more on it all day this coming Friday. I realised a few people have been adding their anatomy lecture notes to their blogs ... mine are a little too scruffy and only I can just about read them so I think I'll just keep them to myself, they will be very useful though!

I have progressed more with this model but I forgot to take pictures so I will make another post after the Friday session.

Starting work on character face iteration (along with feedback).

Now I've had an experiment with values and whatnot I can begin concepting what my three ladies are going to look like. The aim with them is to get three very different looking pieces so visually they will have different faces which should help me try and combat my weakness of 'same face' drawing, all my characters tend to look the same and this is something I want to avoid.

Each character has a facial trait that relates back to their time periods or torture devices. The Iron Maiden will have a metal mask covering so won't have hair which will be incorporated into the mask design. Rat Torture will try and appear as though the orginal woman fused with the rats that killed her so she will end up with a long thin face, her ears will stick out more and her features will be rat like with a long nose, beady eyes and if showing her front teeth will be rat-like. Pear of Anguish is going to be working along with the anorexic appearance to go with the body, her eyes are large and sunken in, her cheeks hollow and her skin very pale, this will be covered with makeup heavilly to hide the waxiness of the skin and cover up the rip marks from being tortured, this rip will be 'mended' to help hold the jaw together.

I had a lot of fun with these, I normally find iteration quite a chore, and Iron Maiden was particularly the hardest for me to actually get the courage to start on, I think the last of humanity in the face was what made it so difficult but once I started it was hard to stick to just 6 versions because I was having so much fun!

After compiling all these iteration pieces I went to our GAD facebook group and my personal facebook page looking for feedback, the facebook group as always gave very little in the way of feedback, with so many people I was hoping for a bit more to assess which ones work best so that was a little dissapointing! Here are the results.

However I feel I have a fair amount of feedback to go on and can take this and carry it forward to working on hair for the rat and pear characters and then onto clothing!

Chosen Silhouettes and Values

I think I've been getting the end of year blues, I've been spending so much time thinking about graduating and what is going to happen after I leave uni that it's been setting me back as far as my creativity goes. I had a look through my silhouettes and I've decided which I would be taking forward to the next stage which is Values. These are my chosen 9 (three for each character)

And here are the values, I am in so much love with how they all turned out especially with how bummed out I've been feeling in regard to creating, the Pear of Anguish in particular I feel is the strongest and I am adoring how her costume came out in the values! I often feel my values are really messy in comparison to other peoples but for the kind of style I want to use it works really well. One of my biggest hurdles is to stop comparing myself to other people and their work ... I have to just keep believing in myself and it will all come out right!

A few more silhouettes!

The feedback I got about my silhouettes was "Although meant to be quick, silhouettes need to be more considered and contain deeper thought into the choice of shape / form intended for further development." so I thought I would have a little bit more of a play with them, this will also loosen me up and get a few conceived ideas out of my head.

I also wanted to explore shapes more and found Alchemy is one of the best ways to do it, I always struggle to do silhouettes in Photoshop as all my silhouettes end up very human and stick man-like. Alchemy give me that certain inhuman shape I am looking for with these torture device characters.

There were the results.

I wanted a little more of a rounder shape for some as the Pear of Anguish has the curvy bell shape to it and because it is also a very benign device, it doesn't look threatening. The Rat Torture and Iron Maiden are a little more harsh because of the nature of the devices, I went with more spiky shapes and more square because for the Iron Maiden its a bulky object and must be represented as such visually, the spikes because of the inside of the Iron Maiden. The rat torture also features spikes to represent the bucket that held the rats, these can be developed further in Photoshop to make them bigger when I do my values and colours.

I'm not sure if I want to do any more with the silhouettes, I got a lot of nice shapes here and I need to stop being so obsessive with them, Nigel said do hundreds but I honestly don't think I can.

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In anatomy we've started adding leg muscles, it's really progressing quite nicely. It's so fascinating watching it all come together! I'm still rusty with all the technical names, but I can start to recognise particular muscle groups during weekly bouts of watching wrestling so it must be impacting me somewhere!