Pepe and Lucas - The Clown who would be Clown.

Spoiler Alert: this guy is the evil Magician.

It was a difficult choice to make, but this guy was determined to be a little less of a perfect fit for our protagonist. At that point, the story had lost the Magician as a main character, but later my director introduced him at the end of the short as an easter egg - the villain who might threaten Pepe and Lucas' happiness and new found success. The body shapes and silhouette still worked very well within the style of the other two main characters, so we gave him a wardrobe and personality change. In retrospect, I think the key to this character's success is that hair. It works even better as a dome of greasy, evil guy hair.

I still went through a thorough exploration of color palettes with this clown.

Eventually, red became the unifying color for this clown's design, just like with the design we ended up using. As you can see, I kept the tie white for most of the exploration, but as I was adding more and more red to the other clown design, I did the same for this guy.

I think the one element that made this guy just a little less perfect, was that he feels more contemporary. The colors are a little modern too, especially the neon greens, but even the design of the clothes elements feels like something you might see on a clown today.

I love doing expression sheets. It helps flesh out the character personality, but with highly stylized characters, it's particularly valuable to see how your character's expressions and movements work with abstracted body forms. I didn't hear any complaints about this character when we modeled him as the Magician, but he only had a little screen time. The other final Clown design caused some concerns because the nose was much higher on the face and often blocked out a lot of the eyes when we saw him from the front, which caused us to adjust the design in 3D to make his eye movements a little more legible.

Pepe and Lucas - Making the Clown Part 2

In my last post, I said that the below sketch was the design that was really our first solid step forwards for our short film. 

However, we still made a few tweaks to the design. Pepe seemed weak and small, but he'd lost a little bit of his "clown-ness." I brought back in the bowler hat and flower. Eventually, we lost the cutoff gloves in favor of what I now think of as "Mickey Mouse" gloves. It just added that extra level of cartoony, which was becoming increasingly important as the story was becoming more and more ridiculous (in a good way).

In my 1st round of sketches for any project, I don't always stick to a standard three quarters standing pose. It doesn't always describe the personality enough, plus it gets boring if you're doing several variations. However, I do end up doing some kind of standing pose eventually, so I can create a lineup to compare all my iterations and those of my artists in a lineup.

Before settling on the far right sketch, my director had me check out just how fat we could make our clown and still keep him appealing. Once we'd chosen a character with a scrawny neck, it became necessary to make his "fatness" match his natural physique from before his body went to crap -  a little pot belly became the solution.

Once I had an approved linework sketch, it was time to move on to color. I knew that I wanted red to be the dominant punch color, but I was less sure of the rest of the costume. It was kind of tricky, since clowns are so multi-colored, and mimes are made up entirely of black and white. No matter what color I picked, the clown would always dominate the screen over the mime.

For a little while, I worked with solid colors. I worked with variations of green compliments, but it didn't feel quite right.

Yellow, blue, and red. The primaries.

 Blue stripes and orange.

 Blue and white stripes and orange. I was testing out scarf colors too.

 I really wanted green to work...

By this time, I'd found that white stripes added a necessary level of complexity to the torso, but also broke up the power of whatever the shirt color was without adding a new color.

A clean and dirty version. We ended up going with the clean version since our beginning events were simplified to get the story moving, but also because excessive dirt and grime was distracting and dampened the colors a bit.

Eventually, I returned to primary colors. I think the reason that some of my earlier explorations didn't work was the addition of the secondary or tertiary colors. When I had worked with just primaries, the amount of each color was pretty even. I had thought that bringing in red to more than just the head would be too much and too monochromatic, but it felt just right, with blue being the second dominant color and a dash of yellow for the scarf. Easy right? In my next post, I'll upload the other clown option that we almost went with, but still kind of did.

Pepe and Lucas - Making the Clown Part 1.

The first step we took to begin "Pepe and Lucas" was to develop the main characters - the mime, the magician, and the clown. We only had a brief description of the story events and the world and it essentially boiled down to 3 street performers with different abilities who compete/fight for money/fight for the audience's attention. It would take place in a stylized world made up of entertainers living in an entertainment-centric environment. None of the "races" of entertainers would get along and would have constant turf battles, like the Sharks and the Jets from "West Side Story". There'd be outrageous battles, fight scenes, chases, comedy, and a romantic angle. My director wanted something nostalgic calling back to the days of vaudeville and the art deco era. Basically, the western world in the 1920's through 1940's. Other than that, it was pretty much a blue sky situation, which was fantastic. 

Each character presented it's own unique challenge since the story was still in development, but the clown was perhaps the most challenging in that he would do the most changing and had to be the most appalling character at the beginning, but the most appealing by the end. We needed a character who was down-and-out, a slob, desperate for attention, and starving for success. He would be embittered by fading memories of success and essentially would have fallen in the world to the point of embodying the stereotype of an "angry drunk clown".

 A lot of my initial sketches featured the clown drinking or drunk and usually very fat and slovenly. It seemed impossible to empathize with this character and I realized that I had been working backwards. If you draw an unappealing character, you get an unappealing character. I started drawing the clown with both his angry/bitter face and also his revitalized hero face so I could make sure he worked on both sides of the personality spectrum.

 I also found very quickly, that while a fat slob version of the clown could be very pathetic, making him short and stocky or tall and heavy always made him look a little too dangerous or too thuggish. It would  look like someone who could really intimidate with their body weight, and that wouldn't demonstrate the kind of emotional or physical weakness we needed. I started drawing a lot of smaller, petite characters to offset that element. I realized that I needed someone small enough that they would not be a physical threat to anyone, someone aware of their size who would be much more prone to emotional outbursts. Essentially, a child with anger issues. Maintaining a small stature was important and to bring in physical weakness, I started reducing the size of the chins, making bigger heads and scrawnier necks.

 This guy made it to the final round, although he went through some revisions as you'll see.

 This is the sketch that eventually led to the final design. I didn't do a happy version of this because I knew I had it. It's the only drawing where I drew a sad clown. I had been so focused on the "angry" drunk stereotype, that I never considered drawing someone in despair.

 I was running out of steam here :)

Looking back on these designs, I remember that I explored both European clown costumes and history as well as American style clown costumes and history. Even though many elements of the clown costume don't change over time - big shoes, wig, face paint, baggy clothes, and of course the red nose, the clown more than any of the other characters felt right in a more American style, depression era costume. You'll see in a later post that I created full color clean and dirtied versions of the characters. I found that a clown with a more contemporary look or color palette or European dress didn't read as "broken" when dirtied up, just dirty. His patches were the patches of a clown costume, not the patches of a life hard fought. The hobo clown look of the American Depression said so clearly that this was as good as it got. It really represented his economic position in life. In the end that was sufficient and we didn't end up texturing him dirty for the short. It also seemed less like a costume and more like someone's day to day wardrobe. The nostalgia of that time also made the clown feel much more like a forgotten person who hadn't seen a good day in a long time, like he was permanently stuck in the gutters.

In my next post, I'll load up the color steps we took to bring Pepe to a full color finished character concept.

Pepe and Lucas - Pepe expression sheet.

Hi Everyone, I'm happy to say I've finally gotten all the work I did for "Pepe and Lucas". I was really lucky to get almost a year of time, virtually uninterrupted, to art direct and develop the visuals for "Pepe and Lucas". It's some of the best work I've done and I'm proud to share it. 

Below is one of the expression sheets I created for the protagonist, Pepe, to help flesh out the emotions he might go through in our story and provide the riggers with an idea of what facial capabilities the model would need.

Personal project...

A little project I've been working on behind the scenes. Hopefully, there will be more to come.

Tony Weinstock is on ARTSTATION BETA 1.

No artwork to post today, but I wanted to say I was just offered the privilege to show my work on ArtStation Beta 1! You can see my artwork here: http://www.artstation.com/artist/tonyw
but I highly encourage you to check out the main page http://www.artstation.com/, so you can see all of the other awesome artists. I've only had a little while to customize and upload stuff, but I have to say the quality on display is pretty high. It's easy to upload and edit. The best thing to me is that some of my more complex/photo textured stuff doesn't get all the graininess that I've found when uploading to Facebook (not that I'm expecting greatness from an FB pic) and even here on blogger. I don't plan on leaving Blogger, but Bravo ArtStation.

Duel!! In space.

Been awhile since I did a new blog header.