Exercise - Animal Farm

I was excited by the idea of modelling my characters so I bought some plasticine and based on my own dog made this using pipe cleaners to give support the legs.

I also made a simple wire frame.

 and added plasticine.

I drew them in my sketchbook.

It's a useful technique for character development but I found it hard to move the finished models. I made a severed head which was easier to manipulate into different expressions.

because I got a bit carried away with the modelling I didn't get round to drawing these. I didn't feel that I had managed to get a very good range of expressions so I changed tack. 

Otter was my daughters favourite toy and travelled everywhere with us for years so I feel he is really part of the family. 

 I'm still finding it difficult to get a really good range of expressions so at the bottom of the second sheet I copied a range of character expressions from this site.

There are some websites which give you a range of photos at timed intervals. I used this one and set the interval to 30 seconds so that I didn't have time to overthink things.

Some worked better than others but for drawing from photos they are livelier than I would have expected. They're not animal characters and I think that I still need to work on expressions so I drew from this sheet.

These aren't as expressive. I tried not to slavishly copy the originals but I wanted to keep the style of them. My aim was to concentrate on technique and learn from the simplified style rather than to make the work my own. I did find it an interesting exercise and I think that I learnt from it. You think that you know what expressions look like but more analysis is needed to replicate them. I need a lot more practice if I am to use my characters to tell a story. The expressions here are more exaggerated than mine were and I think that this is needed to clearly explain what is going on. I don't think that the otter isn't expressive enough but I do think that I was too heavily influenced by the original shape and demeanour of the toy. Part of the story also comes from the surroundings and the other characters even with EH Shepherd's pared down drawings of Winnie the Pooh he has more than one character and something to set the scene in most of the drawings that I saw at the Victoria and Albert exhibition.

To finish off I needed to see if I had really learnt anything from my copying so I redrew otter using the mouse expressions as reference.

I've still got a lot to learn here and in profile otter looks variously like a hippo or a dinosaur but its a work in progress....

Tutor feedback

She felt that the 3D models were the most successful but agreed that this is another learning point. She liked the broad range of approaches and could see value in the pencil drawings.