Alex's crow designs

Jazzy's asked for us all to start sketching out some ideas in terms of character design and story progression, so that when time comes on Tuesday to begin scriptwriting we can cherry pick from everybody's work so that the final product is something that each of us feel we had a fair share of input on. So here are my attempts!

I had a crack at drawing some crows from reference to try and get a feel for the body structures and whatnot; my first few drawings were a bit lacking as I find it quite difficult to sit down and simply copy what's in front of me. It's quite difficult to capture any sort of life that the original has if you don't understand why it's shaped like that or moves that way! My crows looked more like seagulls!

So, for me, the next logical step was to take a look at some basic bird anatomy. I Googled a bunch of skeletons and a basic bird anatomy tutorial that explained the basic positions of limbs, construction of muscles etc. I don't feel there's a need to turn it into a biology lesson and learn the names of each underlying bone or muscle, but just knowing what's underneath the surface of what you're drawing — the construction and the basic mechanics — is amazingly helpful!

I'm certainly not a wildlife artist, but I feel that my understanding of the physiology is better as a result - the wings, why the back was that shape and why the head arcs like that. As a result the drawings came together much more easily. In cases where the subject is very dark in colour and you can't see a clear outline of the limbs, knowing that they're there and how they move allows you to make an informed estimation when drawing them. 

And finally, on with the designs:

I started considering how a crow's design might be simplified or caricatured. They have much larger beaks and very beady little eyes, so it made sense to try and exaggerate those features as part of the design. Jazzy said that the scarecrow should be tall and thin, so I thought it would be quite nice to have the crow short and stocky with a lot of rounded edges to create a bit of contrast. 

Still toying around with the short/round crow idea at this stage. I was playing around with constructing the body from different shapes to see how that would effect the silhouette and implied personality of the character. I think I was struggling a bit at this point — I find it tricky to portray the personality of a character without context. Static sketches like these always tend to be a bit lifeless and dull, but at this point I'm just trying to get a feel for how different shapes and bodies come across.

The other specification/suggestion Jazzy gave us for this crow is that she wanted it to be very subtly girlish, so that there was a kind of flirtatious implication between the two characters. Of course the first thought is always to just add eyelashes to it, but that tends to feel a bit shallow and too obvious. I messed around with the idea of adding rosy cheeks to it instead, which I thought might work quite nicely with the dark feathers?

More toying with body types. I'm really liking the idea of such a squat body with almost no limbs — I think it creates quite a nice silhouette and gives a lot of distinction to the character. 

I'm not terribly happy with the drawings I've done so far; they feel quite stiff and just generally lacking somewhere. I think that a lot of it is to do with context; as I said, I find it quite tricky to portray the character without it — I suppose these could just be seen as exercises to get going, to get a feel for shapes. I think the real character will start coming through and developing itself once we start building scenarios.