It's a thousand years old conflict..

Story of a son not living up to his dad's expectations has been done thousand times.

It's even more so  when it comes down to animation.. recently, Cloudy with a chance of meatballs, How to train your dragon has set the bar even high up.. 

I have great examples that I can follow. Maybe too great that I feel like I'm falling short constantly...but what can I do, all I can do is to try my best. 

Here are my recent attempts

1.I was still feeling very lost with the Dad. I couldn't figure out why every thing I drew looked  not cartoony.
I tried getting rid of the details as mch as I can but without much success.
2.Then came the realization. the way I was drawing the hair was all wrong. No matter how much I tried to simplify the  facial structure, the fine lines of the hair were conflicting with my design.
This was my solution. I think it works much better
3. 4. I'm still not sure if I should give him thick eyebrows.
5.I tried the new hair aesthetics with the son. I don't want them to look too differnt in style..

More exprerimentation with  head shapes and body types.

I'm really happy with the four heads in the middle. I'll try a bunch of different shapes and use them as the villagers in my short.

I think I'm slowly getting there with dad. Designing always frustrates me but I love the sense of improvement over time.

Not quite there yet

Well, I really haven't found a solution for the dad yet.. I'm debating whether I'll give him a big fore head with no brows or a bit smaller forehead with really thick brows that covers up most of the eyes.. The top right one seemed promising but I went with a farmiliar details or bottom right one , just out of laziness.. I should experiment way more until I get lucky with my lines..

Character design is hard..super hard.
My drawing style is not so cartoony by default so I always have a hard time coming up with a simple and strong character. It takes lots of experimentation before I actually start to like what I draw...in many cases the evolution  starts with an accidental shape that I didn't intend to draw...and I take it from there..
This is how I got to the point where I am with the main character. It took me about three weeks...working about 4~5 hours a week at tops..

I started with a design I'm farmiliar with.. some what square facial shape that I got used to doing some freelance work last year.. after drawing similar figures couple of tries, I realized I didn't like the ponty jaw shape so I drastically flattened the chin resulting in more ape like mouth shape.  I started to get vague idea of what I'm going for by the pose study on the far right.

One on the far left was the first design I was kinda happy with.

I kept on experimenting with the how far the mouth and forehead would stick out.

also with how smooth I want the jaw to be connected to the neck.

I still had a hard time making him somewhat slick while keeping the cave man like features.

After about two weeks, I got to the last drawing. For now this one is the defining model that I go back to when I start messing  up the proportions of facial features.

At one point,  I heard somebody saying that Russel Brand looks like a gay caveman,so I kinda deviated from the designs that I had and tried to figure out what made him caveman like.. well it didn't really work...

These are some of the failed experiments...I kinda liked the thick eyebrows and guyliner and that's pretty much only thing survived from these sketches.

Well.. that's all for today, I'll post something similar for the dad tomorrow  and have more new character studies!

Welcome to WAOMT!!

Way ahead of my time is an upcoming musical short by Joonki Park.

Originally it's a song written by composer/Lyricist Peter Mills, and I've been wanting to adapt it into an animated short ever since I first heard the song. 

It's in early stage of development. I've started storyboarding and character design few weeks ago and it's been going quite slow. 

I'll try to update as often as possible so stay tuned!!

What I did today sitting in the corner of Chuck's class..

It's a story of a Dad and Son. Here are some dad studies.

Right one was the first computer/color sketch I did for this project.

I liked the big forehead on the left one so I tried to make it a little bigger..

..and tried to make it a bit cartoony..he still looks too young to be a dad.

On the left is the main character. I'll upload earlier sketches tomorrow to show how I got to this point.

Yeah, He's a Gay..veman..

A little less happy.

just a quick pose ....He'll be hunting mastodons in the film..