Saturday, April 10, 2010
Final Project: The Little House of Horrors.
I really liked how our final project turned out. I was mostly in charge of designing the backgrounds for the pages, but also helped in coming up with the design for one of the characters, Zombie.
Let me give a brief summary of our FP on this blog, even though most of it has already been presented and submitted already. :)
Brief Storyline.
Our story revolves around Lil Red, a Monster Exterminator in charge of annihilating horrible monsters in order to keep the peace in her beautiful hometown, Happyland.
Red one day receives a call to exterminate several monsters residing in the terrible Haunted House of Horrors.
She quickly gets on the job and proceeds to the Haunted House.
However, at the Haunted House, Red did not find the terrifying, horrible monsters that she expected to. Indeed, the only thing terrifying and monstrous about those monsters was their appearance. As she visits the respective monsters' rooms and expects to find horrible things inside, she realises that they aren't threatening at all and are actually harmless in nature.
To show this, we used a pop-out effect, where readers can literally "open" the doors which are cut out for them. Take a look at this series of pages to explain this effect:
The "closed" door.
The "open" door.
Revelation of the character's harmlessness!
Our moral of the story is that “all that glitters is not gold.” and that people should not judge a person by first appearances or stereotypes. We should allow ourselves to look beyond the initial facade to the true inner character.
Character Designs.
When we first started out, each of our team was assigned a monster character to design. Initially, due to our different styles, the four monsters looked very different and inconsistent, although they were individually strong and pleasing character designs. Hence, we assigned Dexter to draw all the characters following our designs but in his style to ensure consistency. We came to a consensus to use his drawing style due to its several characteristics that made the monsters look cute.
In order to make our now relatively scary character designs more adorable, we squashed the proportions of the characters to the approximate ratio of 1 head to 1 body. Unnecessary details were omitted, and only the most striking and memorable features of the characters were kept for the final design.
Also, each character's scary silhouette was strategically designed such that the silhouette was essentially the same shape and outline as the revealed design. Mummy's design is the best example of this.
(Mummy's mop looks like a claw in his silhouette.)
My allocated monster design was
Zombie.
The top sketches were all done by me. The bottom few were done by Dexter, who rendered Zombie in his own cool, unique style!
Backgrounds.
This was my main job in my project group--drawing and designing backgrounds.
Here are some of the backgrounds, sketched, drawn and inked by me:
This scene was supposed to resemble a "Hall Of Fame", even though it's more like a "Hall Of Terror". Its purpose was to show the monster characters at their scariest in order to heighten the readers' expectations of how scary the monsters seem. This is so that when they find out what the monsters are REALLY like, the contrast is stronger.
To keep the background perspectives consistent, the backgrounds were all drawn in a centralized and frontal view. It was difficult deciding on this, because things like Zombie’s bed look better and more accurately drawn when viewed from an angle rather than front-on. However, since a flat profile view of the character’s surroundings worked better for our shadow “pop-out” effect rendered on the characters, we decided this was the best way for the backgrounds to be drawn—flat and reminiscent of an old school side-scrolling game.
Colouring style.
We adopted a messy style of colouring using water-colours. This was the style we felt most suited the drawing style of the characters. Water-colour has a messy and haphazardly done feel that is suitable for the sketchy drawings. The original full-colour style of digital colouring on the other hand, would have been suitable for vectorized images, but wouldn't be consistent with the lineart and design of ours.
We intended for the artwork to seem like a child’s piece of artwork. This would suit the theme of the children’s storybook and enable children to relate better to the graphics. Secondly, this colouring style is consistent with our layout being a ‘top secret’ case file. It gives the readers the feeling that it was done by a third person witnessing the mystery scene, similar to cases in courtrooms where photo-taking is forbidden.
Full body digital coloring (above) made the graphics seem 2-dimensional and very flat looking. The bright colors that are used for the characters, especially when colored thickly and fully, made the characters too vibrant and optimistic, which was not suitable for the concept of our storybook. Our storybook was still designed along the theme and concept of a haunted house, hence there had to be an air of scariness in our designs.
Overall, this colouring style is refreshing, and suits the unique concept of our storybook.
We wanted our colouring, drawings, and characters to have a whimsical feel, like this image:
Hopefully, our story was engaging and entertaining enough. :) That's all I have for my LAST EVER NM2208 post! Thanks for reading! :)
♥ head in clouds.
3:24 AM
