Cooperation

During today's lecture we where explained that we had to cooperate with the Interactive Media Top-up class. Basically they designed a game and we had to assist them in developing further ideas or any other thing they might need.

We were then introduced to every students idea and pared on what we usually we tend to draw or like. For example since I worked more on creatures in character design, I joined a student where she was working on a game about a story of a young animal.

To summaries the story, a cub is separated from her parent and needs to survive the harsh world around it till it finds them. During the process it might also start growing bigger in size since days will passing.

The other student had great drawing skills and had already drawn wolfs and snow leopards. We discussed that if she chose the snow leopard it would be much more interesting for the game since we continuously see wolfs included in a lot of projects. Then she asked if I could help her out in drawing a boss character which happened to be a grizzly bear in her story.

Before starting drawing I asked her if she had a particular art style in mind and she said that she was trying to balance the creatures between realistic but yet simple, she also added that it was a kind of Disney style of drawing. To be honest I am not a Disney fan my self and never drew their characters, so I told her that I was going to try it out and see if she would like the outcome.

We immediately hit a problem since the internet was not working properly and we where struggling to get references but somehow we managed to load a couple of images and started drawing. She was focusing on the snow leopard while I was drawing the bear. These are a couple of sketches I made and I was very happy to hear that she did like them since I am not that good at drawing overall.

In this drawing I tried to catch the most dominant things of the bear, like his moth eyes and huge shape as whole. Since this was a boss and it was going to be trying to kill the leopard I gave him a mean look and fearsome teeth, while to make an emphasise on his roar, some saliva is coming out of his mouth.

I explored some other different poses which she might find useful as the stand up pose. Bears stand up in order to look bigger and fearsome and to a cub it would surely be terrifying.

For some reason I imagined the introduction of the boss to be sleeping and the cub trying to sneak past it. So I searched for a sleeping pose, yet a pose that does not look "cute". I managed to find one really strange that it almost looks as dead. It is so much relaxed and doesn't care about anyone around him, because it is the strongest, that the pose looks like it slept while walking. As I did for the others I tried to simplify it as much as possible while still keeping the main features.

Then she told me that she would also like to include a Siberian Ibex and a kind of buffalo which I forgot the name.

It was a good experience cause it makes you adapt to a work flow that you are not familiar to. Probably it is very similar to a working experience with a professional company since you will not always draw or do the things that you like, but you will have to adapt to different projects, come up with different ideas and help in the production.