Random character design for a story I'm working on.

Portsmouth Uni: 'Methodology'

For this project we had to basically pick an animal, research it and build up a collection of work looking at the chosen animal and branching off that to create a final piece. I chose orangutans as my animal and started off by just looking at images of wild orangutans and dictionary definitions of them, then I chose 5 words to describe my animal; agile, animated, slothful, recluse and hairy. I used these as a starting point for my project.

Infants have a very strong bond with the mothers, stronger than that of humans so I looked into that and thought it would be interesting to see how I could portray that bond as an illustration.

Naturally I began to research evolution which was an interesting progression.

From here I began to look at the anatomy of oraguntans and their body movements.

Working on the body language and movement led onto animation and orangutans withing cartoons, the most famous being King Louie from the Jungle Book.

The facial expressions started to interest me. Orangutans are very expressive, both with their body and faces.

I also looked at the comic 'My monkeys name is Jenifer' for inspiration and over-the-top expressions.

For my final idea I wanted to go back and incorporate the 5 words that I had chosen, so I begane looking at ways to illustrate each of the words.

'Slothful'

'Agile'

'Recluse'

'Hairy'

'Animated'

I wanted to represent each image in the same style so as to have them all as a series rather than individual pieces. I looked into ways of drawing orangutans and how to create a series of images that reflect each word but also stay consistent in terms of style and substance. After doing some research on the artist Don Kenn and his artistic style, I thought his drawing technique, combined with my own, would make for interesting images.

'Slothful'

'Hairy'

'Recluse'

'Agile'

'Animated'

For my final piece I decided to place these images in real life situations that would reflect the words, then take pictures of them as though capturing them in their day to day lives.

The images are not brilliant quality but I like that it adds a sort of amateur quality to them, even if it wasnt of purpose.