Further Character development- the girl is taking shape

So with the initial sketches I pulled out some of my personal favourite features from both mine and Meg's Sketches which you can see in the kind of influence map below. Although I've made it clearer on the map which parts were the 'Hero' parts so to speak there was a little bit of experimentation with various heads on a body creating our first sort of character line-up.

These little girls were created back to front, D was invented first followed by C and so forth. But it would appear we inadvertently saved the best till last. Design A we agreed is our favourite. She is the most adorable design we have so far and with any luck her cuteness will serve to make her story all the more heart wrenching when the animation is completed. The next step is to test out her various outfits and colour them. Meg designed a few outfits previously and those will be trialed on the body. We will also be getting into the nitty-gritty of colour and textures in the style of our fifties cartoon art influences. 

To kick start a colour palette, Meg showed me a novel way to find the sorts of colours we were after. Taking the bright colour tones from our fifties kitchen influence map images, we then used a filter in photoshop called 'crystallise', which took out all the details and left us with this broken mishmash of the colours. These will be used to colour the girls fantasy home life of her imagination. The same filter was applied to a series of darkened post apocalypse images from the game 'Fallout 3' for the subdued colours we wanted for the little girls bunker reality. 

Having found some colour palettes and a general look for our character I went on to combine the two and created the initial test runs below. I also took the opportunity to correct the figure and add a few extra features such as frilly socks. She's looking pretty cute!

Character Development

So with a little word during a tutorial we realized we've got our priorities in the wrong order. Top of the agenda should be the character design. So with Meg's rather helpful influence map and inspiration from our art style between us we have produced the sketches below.

Her are some of Meg's thumbnail sketches including the deliberation as to how tall our character should be. We feel drawn to the design thats four and a half heads high. The girl looks old enough to understand some of the situation around her. The fear behind the Atomic age, but young enough to still have an air of naivety in the way she plays with her toys.

While Meg went about the thumbnails the traditional way I hopped to it with a graphics tablet drawing on the cartoons of the era. Beginning with faces and head shapes and slight variations in hairstyles before I moved on to bodies.

Heads

Bodies

Bunker - Initial Thumbnails

At this point I'm still quibbling back and forth regarding a private or public bunker. #4 and #5 were largely to establish the bare necessities for survival, and figuring out how to best use the limited space of a bunker. I'm not sure it's the very best use, as I foresee a lot of falling-over of chairs. What I gathered from these thumbnails is how there can be absolutely no wasted space in a bunker, so as well as feeling claustrophobic due to the low ceiling and windowless walls, it will also need to feel crowded by furnishings.