Parade – Jean Cocteau

The characters I am choosing:

For this project we were tasked with choosing three of the characters from the ballet and creating our own version of the ballet. Below I have listed the characters I will be emulating for my own production. These include: The Chinese conjuror, The American Girl and The French Manager.

The French manager

”The three managers were considered to be the most cubist and therefore the most shocking the ballet. The French manager moved in a jerky staccato manner, stomping his feet and banging his walking tick on the floor to attract the attention of the crowd.

Exploring Cubism

Artist research

Pablo Picasso – Between 1907 and 1917, Picasso “reshaped” art history with his cubist period. Picasso’s cubism flattened reality into a single plane of geometric shapes.

To further understand parade, we looked at cubism, as most of the costume designs for Parade were created using this style. As a class we watched a tutorial on how to create a Cubist piece, using an shape we wanted to, this was really interesting as it helped to break down how Picasso made his costume pieces.

My response

After breaking down how to make a cubist piece I wanted to redraw Picasso’s design of the French manager, especially to get an understanding of how his costume is built up. It was another exercise to create a collage, so I took Picassos design and created using basic newspaper cuttings.

Initial Ideas

After choosing which Parade characters I wanted to explore, I started with the idea of each character taking a different shape, all different heights and widths. Then based on the original costumes I drew my brief ideas for each character.

Artist Research

Josh Wong

Josh Wong is a character designer, who develops his characters by drawings loads of different versions eventually narrowing them down once he gets to his desired style. This ensures that by the time he has reached his final design he has the utmost confidence in how they work and appear. I like the way the artist draws these characters repeatedly in different poses and outfits.

American Girl

Artist Research

Researching character design in Kung Fu Panda

The character designers for Kung Fu Panda created the character from the idea that he needed to be able to complete different kung Fu poses, placing him in typical Chinese clothing in order to complete the design.

The move is from a wuxia genre version of ancient China populated by anthropomorphic talking animals, as a result, the costuming for the characters takes inspiration from these genres, using armour and fabrics typically seen within martial arts. Whilst I wanted to look into how they generated the costumes for the characters, martial arts costuming is far away from the conjuring uniform I needed.

However, the creators did give an interesting point, surrounding designing the costume around the panda rather than, forcing the panda to fit into the costume I need. This influenced me to draw a panda in different poses based on multiple videos I watched online. Obviously pandas don’t typically walk around the way a character panda would, but analysing their movements is helpful towards the type of character I want to build.

The chinese conjuror

For the character of the Chinese Conjuror I wanted to look at the famous Chinese panda, Hua Hua, since after reading Chung Ling Soo’s background, their level of worldwide fame surrounding an exaggerated character mirrored each other. Hua Hua got famous on the internet for her unique appearance and gentle personality, resulting in large amounts of tourism to the Chengdu Panda Base, with tourists lining up half an hour before the base opens and waiting for hours simply to get a glimpse of her in her exhibit, similar to the actor going by the name Chung Ling Soo, Robinson was a popular stage magician in Europe and eventually became one of the highest-paid performers on the vaudeville circuit.

Inspired by my research into Kung Fu Pandas character designs, I watched different videos of the Panda Hua Hua, sketching her in different poses in order to understand how a panda would wear clothing.

The French manager

Based on the French Managers original design, I tried to de-cubify it to fit in with the styling of my other characters, initially this is the design I went with for my manager.

As you can see I was incredibly indecisive with designing my character, in comparison to the other two I definitely felt he was the weaker of them.

Combining the characters

In order to test my doubts, I drew all of the characters together, working out the height difference for all of the characters, this massively influenced my choice to change my character, I felt as though he was a really generic character, and compared to the other two I had no passion for him.

Redesigning the French Manager

Combining the finished characters

Storyboard

The product

The Setting

Creating a different narrative

Starting to draw the finished project

Whilst drawing more detailed versions of my storyboard I lost interest with the idea. I’m not exactly sure why but I decided to take the project in a different direction, this time explore using colour and more digital work rather than pencil which is all I had used up to this point.

Artist Research

Minna Sundberg – Minna Sundberg is a Finnish illustrator and cartoonist who creates these pretty digital illustrations showing her characters in different settings, interacting in different ways, that clearly show their dynamics. I think for my own characters I would like to explore this idea, however I have never created a digital piece as detailed as this before so it will be interesting to see what I can achieve.

Final Outcomes

Character sheets

Evaluation

I think overall this project was very much up and down in terms of both my motivation as well as standard of work. I think as you scroll through my pieces you can easily see which parts of the project i enjoyed versus what I very much didn’t. At the beginning, I really enjoyed looking into the characters of Parade and being able to translate different elements into my own designs. For the characters of The American Girl and The Chinese Conjuror, I was very quickly able to establish their overall design, easily generating a general idea for how I wanted them to appear. However, with the design of The French Manager this definitely wasn’t the case, I really struggled coming up with a design I could get behind, and his initial designs felt boring, and just not something I wanted to draw. This pushed me to change the characters design entirely focusing on a rat manager instead. This change caused the project to take off a lot more quickly, and I was able to further develop my stop motion skills that I had initially practiced during the drawing project. I am quite pleased with the short film I made of my characters and i do believe you get a really good idea of how the characters interact. However when i further tried to develop this idea to make a longer product, I lost interest once again, starting a longer animation but eventually not being able to finish it. This resulted in me leaving the project at a standstill for a while, not wanting to take it any further. It wasn’t until I started researching character design illustrators that the project starting picking up again. I decided to experiment with colour, something I hadn’t really done up until this point, in a digital format. I redrew one of pencil sketches using ProCreate which I really enjoyed the process of, and I do think I got a really nice outcome. This influenced me to digitally draw my initial character sheets in this style, creating more polished versions.

As a result, whilst the project is quite inconsistent I did learn a lot about my own process, and as an artist which aspects of my own creative practice I need to improve on. I need to greatly improve my stamina when it comes to drawing the same characters over and over, as well as putting more colour into work, where needed. My outcomes for the project clearly show the improvements that I slowly made throughout this project. and have definitely influenced my artistic decisions going forward.