Week 2 - 27th October 08 (Backdate)

27th Oct

This next week was fairly productive I set about hunting down a potential thing to personify for my character design project
These are some of the words I hunted down as potential areas to attack:

Neglect - To pay no attention or little attention to; disregard or slight: The public neglected his genius for years.

Torment - A state of great bodily or mental suffering; agony; misery.

Fantasy – Imagination, especially when extravagant and unrestrained.

Defiance – A daring or bold resistance to an opposing force/open disregard, contempt.

Realisation – The making or being made real or something imagined, planning etc/understanding something clearly and distinct

A few kind of nice ones there but they weren’t fun enough so I started hunting weird words
www.worldwodewords.org/wierdwords to be exact

Skulduggery –An instance of dishonest or deceitful behaviour or trickery.

Nympholepsy –A wild frenzy caused by desire for an unattainable ideal.

Janus-faced – Having two contrasting aspects/two-faced; deceitful

Cockamamie –Something ridiculous, incredible or implausible

From here I decided to clamp down on Nympholepsy as it sounded about the most fun to me. I then and began researching into it a bit and here’s a few key things I jotted down:

www.tcsound.de –German film called Nympholepsy, I’m not actually sure whether it’s been made or just a mock trailer as I can’t understand German! :P

Nymphomaniac – Abnormally excessive and uncontrollable sexual desire in women

Nymph – From the Greek/Roman mythology
Minor deities represented by beautiful maidens inhabiting and sometimes personifying features of nature such as trees water or mountains.

Nymphomanic
– May need more than one persons attention
- May be symptom of mood disorder
- Usually end up cheating on a partner

http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-nym1.htm
A little link to Nympholepsy on worldwidewords.org that originally started me off
It says about nympholepsy in George Moore’s ‘Momoirs of my dead life’ as a lust and want for nymphs and when you’ve seen one you can no longer love a mortal woman. It also goes onto talk about the Lolita complex or lolicon which is about lust for young girls so borderline paedophilia... :s I didn’t read that far into it when I made my decision on the word before. Anyway I researched that a touch and found a story of a man’s attraction to a young girl that plays him ‘Lolita’ by Vladimire Nabokov.
I also found it its legal in Japan or where like that... Bit scary really... :s

Here’s a few pictures of Nympholepsy I found


By Paul Robertson


By AlanWright

Also hunted into Nymphs as well as I felt they play a key part in it

Eric Wadley – MySecretGarden


Noordeloos – Fairytale


Fredrik Rahmqvist – Water Nymph


Dsiquei – The Nymphs And Narcissus


John William Waterhouse – Hylas And The Nymphs

Next I began to think about using a hybrid of animals and humans to try personify this so I looked into animal meanings and symbolism in different cultures

*Can’t accredit all the pictures as lots of them I found without artist names etc but I’ll do my beast*

Boar – The warrior spirit, leadership, direction, lust, gluttony, fertility, prophecy, magic, protection, hospitality.

From Princess Mononoke – Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli


Bull – Wealth, Potency, beneficence, generative force, male procreative strength, kingship, taming of the masculine and animal nature, destructive force.
Wallstreet Bull




Crane – Solitude, Independence, messenger communication, higher state of consciousness, wisdom, knowledge.


Dragon – Power of earth, combining bird and serpent as a matter and spirit, breath of life, supernatural power, magic, strength, wisdom, knowledge, guardian.
Komoto Dragon

Ljubljana Dragon


Goat – Vitality, Fertility, Creativity, virility, abundance, lust.



Hare – Rebirth, rejuvenation, resurrection, intuition, balance, fertility, fire, madness, transformation.



Moose – Headstrong, Unstoppable, longevity, value, integrity.



Otter –Laughter, curiosity, mischievous, famine power, grace, empathy, joy, play, helpfulness



Wren – Spirit, witchcraft, the oak king


Also had a little look at mythical creatures to see what i could turn up















Found these two prety wikid ones as well

This one from 'God of war' I do believe


And this one is Ifrit of the 'Final fantasy' games i think this is quite an early version as hes been revised basically every game

Week 1 - 20th October 08 (Backdate)

As with the title I’m going to backdate through my work as iv only just sorted this Blog out properly as I was to busy doing other stuff to pussy around with this.
So,
Firstly I’ll start by saying how drained I feel just to set the mood.
I got a promotion at work just as I started this project which is wikid as I get an extra £1.50 an hour on my wages and I’m boss! :)

Also this is when a 2000 word Postmodernism essay caught up with me and I though i better start it.

Anyway enough about me your here to see all the lovely pictures iv done!

This week was the first week on the character design project and the entire week was taken up by a dude that used to work for Disney named Justin coming in to uni to got through the basics of character design.
I really enjoyed this as I haven’t drawn much in ages and I picked up a few things here and there as well. Such as:
Square shaped characters = Powerful, Circles = Happy and more fun (like babies), and then Triangle = Evil etc
This seems really simple n iv been drawing a bit like this for years but it had never actually occured to me like this before.
Another interesting fact that i learnt is blue pencils done show up on scanner which was kool.
Until I scanned all the pictures id drawn only to realise didn’t come out to well due to being in blue pencil and no amount of photoshopping could save them. This is the main reason iv taken so long to get this blog sorted the fact i wanted them done and out of the way so iv been inking them up in 'Berol Fine line' pens. (I love inking stuff with these been using them for years)

So anyway there all scanned now, well that’s a lie but by the time i post them up on here they will be.
I didn’t realise how much of a mish scanning is :s
My room is right next to the study and my the PC in my rooms not liked upt to the scanner so I've got the PC in the study booted up scanning pics and im running between the two bashing out work and scanning at the same time although i seem to be bashing more work out than scanning which is annoying as its taking ages!
The week begun with us choosing a character and bringing in a number of picture so we could deconstruct the character, therefore I chose 'Raziel' from the 'Legacy of Kain' games series as iv always thought he’s about the koolest character iv ever come across backed up by a wikid back story:
He was a general in an army of vampire slayers the 'Sarafan' then is turned into a hybrid vampire by Kain the vampire all the games mostly revolve around, and Kain makes him his top general. After years of serving him Kain's hybrid generals Raziel and the other generals of the Sarafan Kain has turned start going through evolution and becoming less basic vampire an more divine hybrid vampire. Raziel overtakes Kain in this state of change and grows wings, with this Kain becomes jealous and rips the bones from Raziels wings and gives him a traitor’s death of being thrown into 'the lake of the dead'.
(The vampires in the game cannot go into water or it burns them similar to the way sunlight does although in the games these hybrid vampires have evolved past not being able to go out in the sunlight)
Following this Raziel reawakens transformed and warped where his body has been partially burnt away by the water the god of the world resurrects him as his soul reaver and it turns out the god is not a god but a parasite on the planet feeding off the souls of the dead.


So yeah little insight into Razman and here’s a few pics I drew that day:






I added a bit of detail in this one as I got a bit bored with just drawing poses


And then this one is a little play on body for just making Raz skinnier and a bit more angular


Then we did some more stuff to do with character posing which i found quite frustrating as if i start drawing a picture i want to make something of it as oppose to it just being plane stickman










Next we were given a sheet of paper with various character synopses on and we were to choose one and draw what we thought that character would look like

So I drew this girl called Tessa Brainstorm who in the grand scheme of this little story was some ditzy pretty clumsy girl who fancied the main character but is slightly tomboy n he never notice her in that way and she was also the chief mechanic on the spaceship and daughter of the nutty professor.
Might sound weird by I actually kinda based this on my sister....


Quite like the central one looks pretty believable in that role


Next we were told to do another so i decided to do the evil villain in the story a dude named Dr Kromozone typical evil mad scientist mate trying to take over the world blaa blaa blaa




‘The Lab man’



This last one is me going back into anime mode really n getting a little carried away as I used to draw anime stuff all the time


Next bit of the week we were told to make some kinda creature a bit of a hybrid of other creatures, so here’s what I busted out:





Then we went back to the lil story and had to design the villains henchman i decided do exactly what it says much a hench man


I quite like this dude bit of a beefcake


Following this we had to create the ships little robot helper which was more of a pain in the ass than help
Bit wall-e-esk this one :s



Lastly we were told make a character or creature which is a hybrid of genres
So here’s my little cybrog dragon :)



I can’t believe how much effort uploading all this stuff has been!
I uploaded everything into photobucket as I thought il just load it up as IMG links as I’m a member of a forum where that’s how u post up photos different story here tho. I went all the way through linkin IMG’s n they didn’t work so tried the blogger uploader thing which is pretty rubbish but in the end worked out u need to load up the html code for the pics to show. Mucho annoyance
Got there in the end tho!