DMUGA Week 8 - Character Project... A little bit hectic!

So, we come to our first character project for this year and what a delight it is that we get to literally pick what we want to do. This is great creative freedom, and a luxury to have, however, I do like some guidance on what to make, and therefore the first part of this week was a bit of a struggle. When we were briefed last Thursday for this, I thought there was potentially so much we could do, but at the moment, I feel rather rushed - Leading me to make some bad decisions, and not coming up with anything particularly marvellous/original. By Thursday Morning, we are supposed to have a model sheet to begin modelling one of our character in 3D, plus, finalised concepts; lets see how I got on...

Having only just begun a mood-board over the weekend, I literally didn't have any idea as to what direction I wanted to take by Monday. This was good because it meant I wasn't constricted to the first idea I had in my head and I was open to any possibilities. However, I still wasn't particularly clear by the end of Monday on what I was drawn towards.

Tuesday was a little bit better because I made some sort of progress in the idea selection and kind of had an incling as to what to proceed with. Before I explain myself, I'll talk about what we did in our visual design & life drawings classes.
In came the skeleton, and we posed it next to our life model in a similar pose (emphasis on similar!), and drew them side by side to try and understand the structure underneath by having it visually right in front of us:

During Chris' session, we showed our work to our fellow students and peer/self assessed ourselves on the sentry gun project. We marked ourselves against the criteria, then had our peers either agree or disagree with our self-marking. I quite enjoyed this, but I usually mark myself down/am too harsh. In addition, we began to make some human armatures out of wire, starting with the spine & skull, then building on from there. I haven't yet made much progress on mine, but I can assure you that I'll post some pictures of him when he's done!
By Tuesday evening, I still wasn't sure what to do (narrowed it down to something robotic & or a child), and it felt as if the presentations on Thursday were so close and I hadn't even begun sketching!:

I made the most progress on Wednesday in terms of clearing a lot up for one of my characters, the robot named "Scrap". I began to work on a silhouettes which I picked and I did so because the curve on the back was going to be some sort of shell, indicating timidness. However, this just wasn't working as well as I wanted it to. I mean, if I worked on it, it'd be alright - not too bad. I therefore scrapped it (no pun intended), and came up with a different one, I even thought about working on the one I did on the page of brainstorm sketches (it was a desperate move, but not acted upon!):

I began to develop one and it almost evolved out of nowhere and I just went with it. By Wednesday night, I had a moderately good robot, with somewhat of an emotion and scale - It just needed something more to indicate it's characteristics a bit more (Like the shell idea from the first one). Despite this, I made a front view of Scrap, and would have to push his idea further on Thursday.

On Thursday, we had to present our ideas to Emma and Mike to see how we were getting along with our ideas/drawings. I have to admit, as usual I was kind of nervous but I'd like to think I'm getting a bit better at presentations (Woohoo!). The bottom line for my work was that they like the idea of a little girl and a robot (Stylised) however, my robot I came up with was far too comparable to the 'Iron Giant', and therefore, people are more likely to judge my work against it. Thus, if I were to pick this idea, I would have to do it even better than the original, and put my own spin on it to make it even more unique.
It actually happened to be that they seemed to like a different set of silhouettes on my scale page; The girl with an even littler robot. This is because it implies an owner/pet relationship as opposed to the one I had before which was more like the robot was overpowering the little girl. I therefore chose the silhouettes that they really liked and started to develop those further.
After some thought, I came up with these:

I have begun modelling 'Blue', the little robot character, and this is the progress I've made so far with him:

I have having some trouble with the 'wings'/arms at the top as as well as his feet, so I'll have to really figure out how to model them correctly and just how I want them to look.

Overall, I'd say a pretty productive week, as I've made some creative decisions that I like and I', moderately ok with the progress made so far. I aim to model both characters, so I'll have to work fast on Blue, so that I can get to work on the little girl of whom I have not yet named... Need some ideas!