Karol Week 5 & 6: Iron John and Refinements

Week 5:

In week 5 we designed the eponymous character - Iron John.

In the story the huntsman finds Iron John hiding in the forest. He gathers more men and together they capture this gigantic wild man and then drag him to the castle where he's imprisoned. After some time spent in a cage on the courtyard he manages to trick a little prince into opening it and he escapes. However, seeing the boy scared to tears of what he has done and of possible consequences, Iron John takes him with back to the forest and he takes care of the boy.

Since I've read the story for the first time I've imagined Iron John as an emphatic gentle giant misunderstood and oppressed by people scared of his monstrous appearance. Even though some people have vanished in the forest where he have lived it's never said that he was responsible of those disappearances.

I started with some rough silhouettes, trying out different shapes and proportions. I didn't really have any presuppositions, just wanted to make sure that he appears big and hairy.  

After that I took my explorations further into the sketchbook. I focused mostly on different heads and faces ideas as I knew that I wanted the rest of him to be something between a bear and gorilla body.

I chose some heads that I liked and I attached some bodies to them. The bottom left one was a pretty good representation of what I had in mind so I chose that one for my final image:

Week 6:

In week 6 we decided to take a break from doing new designs and go back and polish some pieces from previous weeks. I made some minor changes to most of my finals, but there's only one big change worth mentioning - the King. As we go along creating new designs, the vision of the Iron John's world in my head gets clearer every week. It's going in a bit different way than I expected in the beginning of the project. Therefore, the king I created in the first week didn't really fit this vision anymore, so I decided to redesign and paint it again from scratch.

I still wanted to show the king as a warrior but time I put some more work into his armour and weapon design. I'm happy with how it turned out and I believe that this version fits the general idea of the world better. 

Karol Week 4: Wild Animals

For the week 4 we decided to design animals that could live in the forest. In the story they are mentioned only once, in the opening paragraph: 'Once upon a time there lived a King who had a great forest near his palace, full of all kinds of wild animals.' The creatures were clearly not important part of the story, however we decided to draw them anyway, just to challenge our creature design abilities. Beside, this broad description left a lot of creative freedom for our interpretations, so we simply couldn't resist.

I started the design process with some rough sketches. The forest that I came up with in the second week was a wet, swampy place, so from the very beginning I knew that I wanted my creature to be some kind of amphibian or reptile. I explored different head and body shapes and sizes.

After that I pushed some of those ideas further in Photoshop. In the sketches below I tried to merge together some real life reptiles with features of different types of animals.

The one that I felt that stood out was the rat-turtle kind of creature in the middle of the page. I decided to make some more variations on how that creature could look but ultimately I got back to the first one and I used this idea for my final image:

I could easily imagine this creature to inhabit the forest I designed the other week; using its sharp claws to climb the gigantic trees and it's beak to catch small mammals.