Pepe and Lucas - Character Model Sheets.

Character model sheets are my least favorite part of concept designing, but they are really important. Obviously, the modelers use them to build a model of your concept, but I find that it also reveals more fully to me what the 3 dimensional shapes are that make up my design.

As I have constantly found from working with 3D artists, there's always room for interpretation of a 2D design and when you work in 2D, there are a lot of short cuts that an artist takes that only work as an abstraction of reality. The way the eyes wrap around the head is often a place that where my front and side view drawings don't match up once modeled in 3D. I usually give the eyeballs much more mass from the side than would actually appear if my front view is matched. You can see the disjoint in Inspector Clousseau examples below. Check out the eyeball in the 2D profile shot. There's a solution in the 3D toy on the right, but you can see that the nose had to to be moved in order to make room for both eyes to sit together. That shift pulls the nose over the mouth as a result.

A lot of anatomical impossibilities will come up in 3D that must be worked out and agreed upon with the modelers, but working out the basic shapes of a character with abstracted anatomy really saves a modeler some time and ensures that the character looks like what I had in mind, from all sides. I've often been told by my 3D buddies that a three quarter view describes the most of any view, but it isn't nearly as helpful from a modeling stand point. Proportions in a 3/4 perspective can't be judged as accurately.

For the magician, the hair ended up being the part that needed extra explanation.

The clown also needed some hair explanation since a hat covered the top of the head, but there was a gag planned where it would pop off when he burst into a fit of rage. I'd done a painting of him with a total afro eluding to the possibility that there was a whole mess of hair tucked into that little bowler. That joke was cut, but it would have affected how the hair was created.

Since I'd drawn Pepe from the front and not in three quarters, I found that a lot of people had mistaken the scarf around his neck to be a collar, even with the scarf tails hanging down his back.

Making the nose fit on his face without intersecting the eyes was a challenge in 3D. We had to play with flattening the eye and adding/reducing the bridge of the nose. It also became a little bit of a legibility issue since it was large enough that it often covered up the eye farthest from the camera.

Since we were simulating real clothing, it was necessary to paint the characters naked so the modeler's could see the body forms hidden by baggy clothing and make sure the cloth bent and folded around those particular shapes. That didn't end up necessary for the mime since her clothing was so form fitting.

For the most part, no character had a really intricate or unexpected backside, but without the drawing of the mime, a modeler wouldn't have known I wanted to cross the suspenders.

Pepe and Lucas - Making the Magician.

 The Magician was the last main character to be designed. As the story was being developed, he was a rival love interest for the mime, then he was just a bad guy, then he was dropped from the story, and then, eventually, he was brought back at the end to hint at a new antagonist for the next chapter in the "Pepe and Lucas" narrative. My first set of designs were made long before we settled on the clown or the mime design and as such, none of them felt right for the part. However, I did like a lot of the ideas I came up with.

Our starting point for the Magician was that of the three types of entertainment we'd be showcasing, the magicians would be the dominant type of entertainers in the show industry. They would be defined by illusions and control and would come off largely as the upper class of entertainers.  Refinement and luxury with a sense of power and pomposity were pretty easy since magicians typically dress that way - so capes and suits abounded in my designs.

 I don't know how this would have ever fit in the story, but I loved the idea that the magician could grow little shadow rabbits out of his head to act as his henchmen.

 Inspired by the costume Ian McShane wore in the theatrical production of Faust. I really liked the way they stylized a formal suit.

 Evil Napoleon.

 Magic transformation gone wrong New Yorker, Eustace Tilly.

 Day of the Dead style magician.

 Thug magician.

 I don't know.

 Back alley hunchback magician.

Snake charmer. Charmer of snakes.

 If you've read my previous posts, you know that the above sketch became the rival design for the clown, which was transformed into the magician. It was easier to maintain a visual style this way, since each main character was developed at different stages of the story in different styles. If only I could have done that for the mime. By the time the magician was put back into the story, his role was reduced significantly as well as the role of magic. The mime would essentially have limitless imagination power, the clown would have a thousand mechanical gadgets, and the magician would have no real power at all, just the illusion of power. He was still regal, but in a Vegas showman way. Over glitzy and hiding behind smoke and mirrors. My director was developing a background story where magicians had risen to the top of the entertainment business, which controlled the city which our short takes place in, and behaved much like the mob, controlling everything from behind the scenes. As a consequence, other forms of entertainment - miming and clowning, would have been crushed and reduced to street performance. I developed this idea a little more when I designed the traveling circus that Pepe trained at, now broken down and exiled to the outskirts of the city.

The final magician design.

As with all the characters, once we had finished designs, I was tasked to create additional characters for that form of entertainment that we might meet in later episodes/shorts. With such a cartoonier and more abstract style, not much of my first round of magician designs carried through. A lot of the mystique was lost in favor of more sequins and more ego. You can see one female design based off of the mime physique :) and several of the other magicians are based on the main magician's design.

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.