Don't Starve - Wednesday

Have any of you played the PC game, Don't Starve, by Klei Entertainment? If you haven't, you should! One of my assignments in college this term was to create a new character to be placed within an existing universe, and while some of my friends picked things like Adventure Time and Valiant Hearts, I picked Don't Starve. And I am so glad that I did!

So the first step in the process was research, research, research. I studied the game itself, paying attention to the the line weight, the colours, the shapes, and everything in between. I made some interesting discoveries that I might not otherwise have picked up on; almost every character in the game wears red, for example, and the males only have pupils, while the females only have whites in their eyes. The playable characters, as a set, are incredibly unified, right down to their names: almost all of them start with the letter W.

I also researched different types of characters that I might like to design; and eventually settled on a Horologist, whom I named Wednesday*. Then I was able to sketch out some ideas (throwing away most of them!) and eventually figured out how I wanted my character to look. Below, you can see how I drastically I changed the character from the original sketch into the final lineart.

The next step was colouring, which was a LOT of fun! We were taught a technique of colouring that I had never used before, which allowed for easy changes later on. It worked out quite well, I think! I experimented with different hues and things, but nevertheless I stayed true to the game's styling, and went with a predominantly red colour scheme, with a lot of black scribble detail.

The final part of the assignment was to place the character in different lighting situations, which was my favourite part, by far! We were given five different themes: 01) Mid-day sun 02) Dark rainy day 03) Moonlight 04) Sunrise 05) Haunted House. We weren't asked to design the backgrounds, per se, but I got a little carried away with them... 

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the end results. What do you think? Does my character fit in with Don't Starve? Do you have a favourite lighting condition?

*In honour of Wednesday Addams, whom I love, and think would fit in with the game perfectly! I also watched The Addams Family recently and remembered how much I loved it all over again. 

Race Against Time

Back in the first semester of college, we were tasked with creating a stop-motion animation inspired by a turn of phrase. I picked "Race Against Time," because there never seem to be enough hours in the day and I'm a (motorbike) racing enthusiast. I come from a family of petrolheads, too, so getting my hands on props for this project wasn't too difficult either. The helmet and gloves were my own, the steering wheel came from my brother's kit car, the overalls are my brothers, and the clock faces were given to me by an old art teacher who'd worked in an antique clock shop at some point.

I first started capturing images for this project one late night in a multi-storey car park in the city. It was a fun night out with my dear friend Emily, but ultimately ended prematurely, as it turns out taking photographs for a few hours there was frowned upon by security...

So, a change of scenery was called for! Thankfully, Emily's father let us loose in his office building for a night when no one was around, and it turned out great. In that one night, we spent many long hours moving things inch by painstaking inch, taking hundreds of photos, and making many a fresh cup of tea to keep us fuelled up. By three in the morning, we'd just about run out of steam, but we'd managed to capture everything I needed to string together a minutes' worth of stop-motion. What do you think? Was it worth it?