The Start of Childhood - Brief #1

New Year, New Blog, New Projects!

This blog has been set up to record my process behind a module called 3D Stimulation. The first brief is an interesting one, in my opinion and the concept behind it should be something that every artist considers. It's a unique experience.

Let's have a look at my initial thought process:

Brief #1: Character Interpretation.

Justin had his children draw various characters for us to choose from and there was a total of 8 images to choose from. The aim of this brief is to take the child's image and put more detail and life into it while keeping the original structure and form of the image. A small collage of the images was put together by myself:

We were given a brief overlook of each character that I'm going to put here for Reference:

Robin Lynch
liberty - queen of the world. people live in her head. 
Lilly and Sammy - Festive characters ->Robyn and her brother.
Grampa & Nanna - Relation to relatity and close-ness.
Tom Magee
Butterfly Boy - Takes butterflies for walks around garden, special pants. Claw hand.
VeePee - Mad Scientist figure.
Tom Magee
Rainbow Bird - Angry birds inspiration. Happy side dark side. Ying Yang.
Aodhan Magee
baby Urangitang - Massive head, small body, stringy arms.
Myoohee - Robot character, claws for hands. Eats thing through stomach. Mass arms. Sasquatch. (Wall-E)

I liked the idea of several pictures. Liberty had an interesting idea, and the brother and sister aspect. The others I did struggle to visualise in my own aspect. Butterfly Boy, seemed right down my lane. The idea of making it something beautiful or something.. Not quite there. The power was mine!

Butterfly Boy in particular had a different feel about him compared to the others. Even from a kids drawing, I could somewhat grasp the idea that Tom Magee wanted to create something.. Obscure.

Something that stumped me at first was the lack of human features in the skull, but after a little more thought it started to inspire me. Not everything needs to be of a perfect human reference. In fact, sometimes things just look better when they're not exactly human.

However, in my mind, I look at the character and see something psychotic. He thinks he is protecting the butterflies when in fact he's hurting and killing them. He's completely zombie-fied. All about the Flutter-byess..

I'm excited to see what I can create and bring to life from this little.. Twisted Butterfly Boy.

Until Next Time~ <3

Brief #1: Child's Profile.

Quick bump-up!

I'm just going to add a quick profile from my perspective of the Child's Drawing. Off we go:~

The Butterfly Boy.

Age: Approx 6-7 Years Old.
Gender: Male.

Personality/Attitude:  The child has a fixed vacant expression, almost emotionless. All he cares about is the Butterfly. He's almost obsessed with them to the point where he wont eat, drink or sleep.

He tends to experiment on himself, he wants to make himself look and feel more like the Butterfly does. He himself wants to be a Butterfly.

The Child thinks he is helping and protecting the Butterfly when in fact he's so obsessed that he's hurt the Butterfly and prevented it's escape from him. It's more like his prisoner, but he is completely oblivious.

Family Relations: It is said that his family sent him off to a mental hospital to try and 'fix his problem' but he only proceeded to get worse and the constriction made him violent. They had to release him before he tortured the place, screaming about 'someone stealing his butterfly'.

He's currently on the run hiding in a vast forest. His clothes have become part of his flesh and any wounds are patched up using whatever he can find from abandoned buildings.


I actually think the child was thinking of something more.. Innocent and Cute-like however I like the opposite approach... <:


That's about it this time, is there anything else I should add? <3

Brief #1: Child Concept-o's

Quick Rendition for y'all~

The aim for this week was to try and colour in the child's drawing to get a feel of the character. Below is the before and after image:

I cleaned up the line art first, added some.. Pretty Diverse detail, then worked on the colouring. It was only a rough render to start with to see if my idea of a more 'horror' styled character would work for such an emotionless zombie-like child.

Some of the Key Features I noticed would be things like:

• Wing-like shapes on his legs compared to his back.
• Bald (Hairless)
• Manic-al facial features.
• Claw hand handling the Butterfly.
• Butterfly is on the ground, not in the air.
• Butterfly's head is detached from body.

With these things in mind I decided that from my perspective this character is of a psychotic nature. He thinks he's helping the butterfly and protecting them but infact he's killing them. And he doesn't even notice.

I moved onto a quick rendering of the character in Photoshop (It's only a really rough attempt):

I wanted to make him into a self-experiment, patchwork-like creature. Not all there and has that psychotic streak quite openly attached to his personality.

Looking back on the render, The shading is a little rough and not so blended and evenly spread. The lines are too dominate in front of the colour. So if I was to do this again then I would make the lines maybe a gray colour and focus that little more on the colour palette and shading/lighting.

I want to try and do a few more render ideas as I move onto a character of my own. A gradient render, a more dark, shading render, and maybe a brighter happier render.

Moving on from the character, I started to get an initial feel of my own character from this concept. I decided to research on the mood board:

A brief overview of my moodboard:

• I took a look at Butterfly anatomy to try and alter the human form accordingly.
• The Flesh, from Doctor Who (BBC), gave me an idea of the 3D aspect of the skin of my character.
• Urgot, From League of Legends (Riot games) was experimented on after a war. He was recreated using human flesh.
• Mr Mundo, from League of Legends (Riot Games) and Sion, are of a similar nature of Urgot. Mundo was self experimentation to make him more powerful and dominant over other people. And Sion has a skin with a patchwork features.

With this in mind I have a few ideas for my character. I want to go for the horrific, deformed creature look. I would like to do some sketch sculpting in Zbrush for this character and my own character. Even if it's not the full thing some small pieces would help with the feel of my character. Lanky limbs and such.

But that's enough for now. The next stage for this will be taking the idea of a 'Butterfly Boy' and coming up with an idea for a character of my own. I already have some ideas but that'll have to wait until the next part. <3