Cerys Ford Computer animation arts

 On friday (the 18th of march) Justin did a tutorial on colour in character design and creating colour palletes for characters. During this workshop, I decided to focus on figuring out colours for my standard dragon species. After a bit of trial and error and discussing it with Justin, we came up with this: I wanted this dragon species to stand out against the blues/greens of the water and be eye catching, but not as eye catching as the fancy dragon species. It took a bit of experimentation, but I think these colours fit really well!

 I've been spending a lot of time working on my dragon species,specifically the wings and the back feet. I was happy with the rest of it in my last concept piece, but the anatomy of the wings and legs didn't work quite right. After talking with my tutors, I decided to go down more of a bird route with the back legs and feet. I also went back and looked at bat wings closer to get what I wanted for the wings.  I'm very happy with how this version looks, and is very close to what I want the final version of these creatures to be, I think a couple more tweaks and they'll be there. Once I had created these, I wanted to explore how these creatures live and behave, so I created a couple more sketches which explore them flying, hunting/diving and eating.

 Again, after discussions with my tutors, I set out to further refine the concepts for the sentient lizard species. I wanted to make sure I was steering away from a humanoid with a reptillian head look, so I specifically looked closely at how reptile limbs work and how the tail works with the rest of the body anatomy wise. What I've got so far is this: It's starting to get there, but honestly I think I still have a long way to go with the sentient species. I'm still not too happy with how the body looks, although I do like the head shape quite a lot. I also need to think more about how this species will be a bit more unique looking, because at the moment they're looking a little too generic.

 After discussions with both tutors and quite a bit of thinking time, I decided that the route I was going with my previous dragon concepts was too generic, and some of my earlier concepts were definetly looking too similar to other designs that had been created. So, instead of using bats as the main inspiration for the shape of the body, I decided to look at completely different creatures, more specifically, the dinosaur genus Pteradon, specifically the Queztacotalus- one of the largest flying creatures and the closest thing to an actual dragon. This led me down a much more interesting route, as you can see here:  After drawing these, I decided to try adding more bird like elements, which resulted in this: I feel that these concepts are much more unique than the previous ones, and I will continue to refine them from here.