Digital Art Session - Anthropomorphic Creatures

For this session we worked with designing an anthropomorphic character, This for those of you who don't know is making animals into more human like characters. The easy example for this is the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which are humanised turtles, so a interesting lesson as it shows how you can imagine the adaptation of an animal as more of a human. (even though i did that for my insectoid design *plugging past blog posts intensifies*)

Our beast of choice for this lesson was frogs, kind of difficult since i don't have any experience with frogs or frog like creatures, would have liked to have done a small study before hand to get a hold of things like the head shaping.

I tried to switch up my habits for this lesson, and tried to make use of quicker sketching and greater use of colour; the colour aspect is because I don't use it alot, and i needed to speed up my workflow because i often get bogged down when working in Photoshop, due to my inexperience with it.

I feel i made a decent start because i choose to make a bunch of simple silhouettes to quickly generate designs so i could just move on and make some designs.

The first design (which for some reason i didn't take a screenshot of a slightly more developed sketch of this) was heavily inspired by the colour scheme of that black and purple/pink frog which made me think of a club or punk like aspect, so i imagined a frog person in a hoodie with the markings on the body being transposed to the hoodie.

The second design was just a desire to see a street shark level of bulky animal, i wanted to make a ripped frog man, and i made a ripped frog man. the pale design on the belly went well with making it seem like he was wearing a vest, so i used some of the colour scheme to affect how he would be dressed, as well as colour distribution.

The last design, probably my best success with painting, but probably the plainest design and i ended up following some of the designs of Studio Ghibli's "Spirited Away" but this is just a regular old frog guy, sort of in a "cleaning off his wounds" position. I found at lot of success by being careful with my brush use, and my sampling off colours from the frogs gave me some excellent oranges, yellows and greens.

Steve showed me the excellent tip of using the levels in photoshop to adjust the image to stop the values grouping up too much. as well as to bring out the value in the image. It definitely make my frog guy look a lot more vibrant. Though i need to focus on tightening up the edges with a hard brush as i mostly used soft brushes for all of these designs.

I think in conclusion i say i've had my most success in painting with photoshop in this session, which is a nice confidence booster, but i will say that my variation in design may have taken a hit in the process, so i need to try and maintain a plethora of designs and work on furthering my painting techniques.