Toolkit 2 - Project 1: Drawing

Over the course of this project, I will be gathering my weekly drawing workshop outcomes an reflecting on how they explore the fundamental approaches to designing characters for narrative contexts. The culmination of this project will be a 'project bible'; a graphically designed document recording the journey of the project through drawings and annotations. My project bible will relate to a prompt I received, I am tasked in adapting the prompt into a successful and personalised 'animation action'. My randomly generated prompt can be seen in the image below;

In-lesson exercises won't directly develop on the prompt I have received. Instead, the aim of this project is to use the knowledge I gain within workshops and apply it to my prompt outside of the workshops, in my own time.

In today's workshop, I worked on research skills. I was tasked with researching into 'a roman gladius', and familiarize myself with this random object. Through image and text references I found online, I was able to develop my knowledge on this style of weapon. 

Developing my research into this sword further, I began looking into  'characterisation', crafting gladius sketches that represented different characteristics. For example; the gladius of an eccentric pompous roman prince, or the gladius of a 4-year old child (inflatable). I found this thought-process a challenge, as characterisation isn't an aspect of visual research that I carry out on my own, this perspective on 'reiterating an object for different characters' was hard to work around.

The workshop explored characterisation further. This time, I needed to design a brand new character from the 'Toy Story' universe. Characterisation was crucial for this challenge because it requires an understanding of recognisable character traits and how they'd apply onto different forms, I found this skill very hard to grasp. 

To make this workshop full-circle, I was tasked with designing another new character, now incorporating the prompts I had received for my project. This new character still required the use of 'Toy Story'. The results are rough, as I was struggling to find inspiration from such unusual task requirements, but the final sketch was a positive note to end on. 

Moving forward, the research methods used within this workshop need to be applied to my independent project prompts. This should help initiate my project and the artistic direction I which to take through familiarization and characterisation.