Leonard

Some preliminary sketches for Leonard, the Queen of France's trusted hairdresser and gay companion.




None of these designs are what I want him to look like, but hopefully I'll get him right.

Color roughs

I had some time to do some quick color roughs for Marie Antoinette's costume; I pretty much came up with the premise of my film out of a wish to do nothing but draw beautiful 18th century dresses, so this was exciting.

Antoinette will only wear one dress, but I just wanted play around with some colors and designs to get me thinking about the overall aesthetic of the film. The final dress won't be this elaborate or colored in this style; I just wanted to play around with some designs. I'm probably going to be using a (super) simplified version of the yellow dress.

Character sketches: Marie Antoinette

One of the 2 characters for my final film is (obviously) Marie Antoinette. I've been trying out a lot of visual styles for this piece, since I'm not sure how well my usual manga-comic style lends itself to Flash animation. And, like I mentioned before, I think this would be a good opportunity for me to expand my horizons and push myself a bit more.

So here are a few sketches I did while trying to pin down my character; I think she's gone quite the long way, don't you?




She's still looking too anime and too "safe" here; I wanted her to have some real character in her facial structure, not just be cute.



I wanted the queen to have a strong jaw, since it's been recorded that she was beautiful despite having the "Hapsburg Jaw", which apparently is the fancy term for an under-bite. Her eyes are still very anime, which just looks wrong with her very dominant jawline. It's really hard to look at your drawings objectively and see whether your designs are appealing and unique and not ugly. I didn't even realize that she looked off until a friend told me she looked ugly.



I changed the eyes and eventually settled to shrink the jaw but still bring attention to it by sliding the mouth up. The designs on the left half of the page are generally what I settled on.

I'm half-way through making a turn-around, so a model sheet should be up by the end of the week. Then I'll get going on the designs for Leonard (the hairstylist), which should be easier now that I have the visual style for the characters figured out.