Builder Research

For my builder I'd like to take him down from the 'Strong' kind of sense and make him a bit more dopey and fat, something of a stereotypical builder.

I like the eyes of the first picture I have where the expression is shown through eyebrows and they also give the impression of a blunt kind of character.
I'm going to increase the gut on my character as well rather than making him overly muscle bound, as to keep in with the builder stereotype I want.  

Mantis Research

Looking at reference of Praying Mantis' I can see how I need to change my design for Mantis Dad.
Firstly, instead of the rectangle with two circles on each end for the head on my original design is noticeably wrong, I need to make it into more of a triangle kind of shape.

Secondly, I need to add more legs and make them skinnier as well, on my design the character looks a lot more human, I think I need to add more mantis like traits but with a human twinge to it.
  

Characters to take forward.

Out of the character designs I've looked at, my two favorites have been the Mantis dad character from the Insect Family brief and the Strong Builder from my builder designs.
These are the two I'd like to clean up from the rough designs and add into my animation reel.

Brain Storm

Insect Family

I had a brief instructing me to create a family of insects, I decided to make a mother, father and Baby in this family.
When thinking about the mother I looked at ladybirds, them being the stereotypical female insect. I wanted her to be a kind looking character.

For the father, I wanted a tall kind of character, a praying mantis was my first idea for it as I liked the eyes which could be drawn as glasses, this gave me the idea for father figure. I had trouble drawing the mouth area so I decided that giving the character was a good replacement for what I couldn't draw and it also worked nicely with the father figure look.
For the baby, I thought about what could be considered a baby in an insect perspective. The two ideas I had were a caterpillar or a maggot, the maggot didn't seem like a good idea because it didn't seem cute enough to be a baby character so I went for the caterpillar. 

I used the caterpillar on this image as reference when I was struggling with the caterpillar legs.

Builder Reference

I'm looking at characters that fit the idea of Intelligent, Strong and Shy.

Intelligent Characters.

Dexter - Dexter's Laboratory

Velma Dinkley - Scooby Doo

Strong Characters.

Bane - Batman

Johnny Bravo

Shy Characters.

Chuckie - Rugrats

Piglet - Winnie the Pooh

Ronald Searle Vampire

I was briefed on creating a vampire character in the style of Ronald Searle.
I'm unsure I did this design very well so I decided to practice my coloring skills with the final design.


Searle Example

Vampire Design

Builder Designs

I was briefed on designing 3 builder characters, one intelligent, one strong and one shy.
These are my workings as I created them.

Thumbnail Acting Shots

I've been tasked with coming up with some thumbnails of a character reacting at key points to a 10 second clip of someone speaking.

The clip I used is from Doctor Who

Monster Design Reference

The three words I have chosen to describe my monsters are-

• Cumbersome 
• gleeful
• dopey

I have looked for some examples of existing characters that I think already represent these traits and they are:

Cumbersome - 

The Hulk - Marvel Comics

King Fergus - Brave

Gleeful

Dopey - Snow White and the Seven Dwarves

Donkey - Shrek

Dopey

Ed - Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy

Rex - Toy Story