Personal Project/Mock FMP - Everything

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To make it easier on your browser, click the 'Personal Project/Mock FMP 2014' label at the top of the page to filter out my equally large AMW post.

Here is everything from my Personal Project/Mock FMP.
The project went alright, but a hindrance was the shorter project time, changing my idea half way through and also that I was ill with chest pains during the last few weeks of the project which really slowed down my productivity, pretty much to the point of not being able to achieve the outcome I wanted.
I'm going to make up for it by working incredibly hard on my FMP, but I hope I've done good enough on my Personal Project.

By the way, this post took four days to write out; Super happy fun times and late nights abound.


For the first part of my Personal Project, I was doing a comic about an anthropomorphic cat who's a saboteur but after a while, I started thinking of an idea I had before about a mature video game based on Greek mythology and fictional monsters.
This is the one I pursued for the rest of the project, but Ill start with the first idea:

 At the start of the project, I doodled random drawings, one of them was a cat character escaping law enforcement by para sailing down a building, reaching for a bag of loot she dropped.

My original doodle; I just thought of a 'cat burglar' escaping the police by parasailing down the building.

After doodling the idea, I started looking into the art of the series that sub-conciously inspired me, Sly Cooper.

Concept art and character art from Sly Cooper; I like how Sly's early concepts portrayed him younger, but they settled with the older Sly in the final project.

Concept art for Star Fox Assault, created by H.Komaki.
Fox McCloud, Bluetights Mcfurrydream, Falco Lombardi and Wolf.

Next after research, I started doing a slightly more refined concept for the cat character I doodled.

I first doodled an idea for her helmet, taking inspiration from ninja masks and paintball helmets; I then drew a quick body view, looking at secret agent outfits for inspiration.
I also named her during this concept, calling her Mina Nakayama and writing her a backstory.

I next tried doing concepts of what she could look like when she's removed her helmet.

I then drew a full body again, this time making the body more anatomically correct. (For an anthropomorphic character.)

Before I went any further, I doodled a test page quickly, and discovered a shading style that I would reuse for most of this idea.

The test page I doodled; I tried a common comic shading style, which is doing the dark shades of a character in block black. (The speech on the first and second panel isn't important, don't worry about the size.)

In the progress of doing the shading; I used a comic image from Google to see how others did the black shading.

After doing the test page, I wanted to put the black shading onto the concept I did before, so I created a refined concept that was fully shaded, and also slightly changed from before. (Red in the colour scheme, a weapon etc)

Along with the main character, I did concepts for other characters too.

I started with some concepts for the employer, who hires Mina but later betrays her.
I first did a bat design for a mysterious look.
I then did a bird design that looked more 'can-do' and serious.
The third head was supposed to be a panther, but it didn't turn out well at all.

In the end, I went with the bat for the employer, and used the bird for the head of the police.
The third head should be sealed in concrete and dumped into the north sea.

One of the first characters I doodled was the person who hired Mina.
An interesting challenge was what she did with her wings, being a bat.
I thought she'd either have her wings rolled up (Which is impossible because of how bat wings work.), a sleeveless shirt so her wings can flow down, or simply having her wings surgically removed.
I asked people which they preferred, and most of them went towards the sleeveless wings design, as it made her look like she had a cloak.

I used the head concept for this character, Dr Jess Acardi.
I looked into police uniforms from around the world and decided with a combination of a US and UK policeman outfit, with a hint of S.W.A.T.
I also again used the black shading to give the image a comic shading style.

One of my favorite characters I designed was Krok, a massive australian crocodile 'hunter', hired by Desiree to hunt down Mina.   He'd use a shotgun for a weapon.

A concept for an Intel character; this was one of the last things I did for this idea when I started rethinking my idea.

At this point, I was thinking about my ideas; This idea I was already doing could be done anytime outside of college, and didn't really have a challenge to it as much.
So I decided to revisit an idea I messed with before the project started, and pursued it.

The idea was a mature game called 'Pandora's Box', which centered around the fabled container being opened again, and the various evils from mythology and fiction spilling out from it, with a now demonic Pandora having to track them down and send them back.

I doodled a demon looking character, later naming her Pandora.

I started with looking at films that had similar theme of crossing over characters from popular fiction and mythology.
The first was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

This film was the story of a group of people with unique abilities.
Alan Quartermain; The man who could never miss a shot, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; The doctor who created a potion to expose his inner evil, Mina Harker; The wife of Jonathan Harker and a vampire, Captain Nemo; the scientist who built a submarine that could travel 10'000 leagues, Skinner; A man who stole the Invisible Man's formula and Dorain Gray; The man who's age is recorded in a painting that gives him immortality.
They had to overcome their differences to fight a greater evil, a masked man called The Fantom.

The second film I looked at was Van Helsing, a reimagining of the Dracula character.

This film was about a new version of Van Helsing called Gabriel, a renowned monster hunter that'd been charged with murder throughout most of the civilized world.
He confronts and accidentally kills Mr Hyde in Paris, before being tasked with going to Transylvania to hunt down Count Dracula.
Whilst there, he's confronted with vampires, werewolves and even the Frankenstein Monster, who's the key to everything in the story.

I had a principle cast of characters in mind, and did research into other depictions of said characters in fiction and mythology.

The first research I did, Pandora, Medusa and Perseus.

The second batch of research, the Frankenstein Monster, the Bride and Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde. 

After this research, I started drawing out ideas.

Some of the first drawings I did; These would be the basis for the characters I would design.

A concept sheet I did for Medusa; From the start, I wanted her to have stitches reattaching her head to show how she was killed by Perseus the first time, and was crudely resurrected.

One character I ended up not using in the project was The Slender, which was based on the internet folklore character 'Slenderman'; I thought that monsters in folklore could extend to the internet.

One of the early concepts I developed for Medusa had her being overweight.
I thought it'd be unique, but instead, I made her slightly muscular in her actual finished concept.

I next discovered a program called Makehuman.
To put it basically, it's a program that lets you create human models, and when combined with the 3D program Blender, the models become a virtual Life Model that you can pose.
Plus, Makehuman has a variety of settings, so you can make old & young, thin & fat, male & female and tall & short.
Below are a few examples:

A few of the models made in Makehuman; There is a good range.

When ported to Blender, you can pose the models how you wish, making them a virtual Life Model that really helped me draw the characters for this project.

Some of the models in Blender; These were immeasurably helpful as Life Models and really aided me.

With these models, I started developing concepts for the characters.

The first concept I did was, of course, Pandora.
I took inspiration from my original doodle of Pandora, but changing some things to make her outfit less restricted and slightly more effeminate.

I also quickly shaded in the concept, and I believe when shaded, the concept gains a whole new look and makes the design even stronger.

I did some concepts for different masks, but in the end I sticked with the mask I had on the original design, as it was intimidating but simple at the same time.

One of the things I had to design was what Pandora looked like before she was turned into her more demonic look.

I tried a second concept for Pandora, making her much darker and more covered. After showing the design to people, a majority of them preferred the original design, so I kept that design.
I also did a sword design for her.

I also created a 'Modern' version of Pandora; She'd don the disguise whilst in the modern time missions, mainly when she has to track down Dr Jekyll.

Next, I started developing the concepts for the characters she'd encounter.

The Medusa concept I created; I moved away from the 'Fatdusa' idea and did a more muscular look.
The choice to expose her breasts was to make her look more animalistic, whilst the metal jewelry gave her a sense of elegance.
Her neck still has the stitches that were in the original concepts, albeit with more gore.

A gif showing the process; Shaded, Flat colours, lineart and the reference image.

Next I did a concept for Perseus, the hero who decapitated Medusa back in ancient Greece.
I chose to cloth him to fit modern depictions of the character, whilst taking inspiration from the Clash of the Titans Perseus for his head.

The next concept was the Bride of Frankenstein.
One of my goals for this character was to create a gruesome looking character, still alive for hundreds of years through the use of mechanical body parts.
Her skin was badly covered with bloody bandages, only just covering her sickly green skin.
Her head was designed to look like a combination of multiple faces, as her face deteriorated over time and also covered in bandages.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde were next.
The first concept I did (Far left) was a 'professor' looking Jekyll, though I thought his coat was too over the top.
The next concept I did was the middle one, which was pretty much what him without his coat.
I wanted to give him a Victorian looking shirt, containing vials of his formula and looking really classy; a book containing his formula  hangs from his belt.
The third concept is him after taking the formula, becoming Mr Hyde.
His clothing tears in several places, his boots come apart at the seams and he grows to a massive size.

The, unfortunately last concept I did was of Count Dracula.
I wanted a design that encompassed the classic Bela Lugosi look of Dracula, whilst adding my own twist to it.
The clothing was designed to be that of a nobleman, whilst looking like Dracula's stereotypical outfit.
For his head, I wanted to make it a mix of the traditional Dracula hair, but also add in features from Vlad the Impaler, such as the mustache and beard.

This is where the project took a downwards spiral.
Before I did the Dracula concept, I was ill with chest pains that caused me to have anxiety (Which only made the pains worse, ironically.) and depression that really distracted me from my work just two weeks before we broke up for easter.
I was able to recover a week later after seeing a doctor, but my project was pretty much derailed, I'd lost focus and Dracula was the last character I could do before the project was done, as I was going to spend the two weeks off for Easter break developing ideas for my FMP.
I was planning on doing concepts for the Frankenstein Monster, Carmilla Dracula, Van Helsing, Zues, Heracles and Athena, but I ran out of time.
So this is where my Personal Project ends.

My Evaluation:

Overall, I think the project went alright.
It wasn't as good as my Mock/actual FMP from Level 3 last year, but I think it's because I changed idea half way through, set myself a very large workload in a smaller timescale and I was also ill near the end.
I liked both ideas I had pursued; The one I enjoyed the most was the thief idea, but I still enjoyed the Pandora's Box idea.
If I could have done it again, I would have either developed the thief idea more or do more object and world concepts for Pandora's Box and explore more of the ideas I had, mainly the missions being in different time periods and crossing a variety of mythologies and fiction.
My favorite part of the project personally was drawing the Medusa character, she was really interesting and I think was the best looking piece I have developed for this project.

Now to start work on my FMP.
Finally.