Premise - Art of 'Sketch vs. Artist

Sketch vs. Artist is essentially a drawing having a fight with the artist that created it. The artist is fighting to keep their idea of what they want their character to look like, and tries to make changes to their drawing. On the other hand, the sketch is attempting to stop the artist in their tracks in an attempt to keep their own identity, as opposed to what another person thinks they should be.

The animation will be light-hearted and comedic, however it is also personal to me and my own journey with gender identity, which is what I wanted this project’s main focus to be.

When I started to think about making a short film about my gender identity, my mind immediately tried to think of ways that I could symbolise my story with metaphors and narratives that were a less direct way of telling my story and without it becoming too personal.

The idea I fixated on was the idea that a character was trapped in a lab and forced to conform to a stereotypical feminine appearance, but they end up escaping the lab and are free to be who they want to be.

The issue I had with this idea was that I continuously found myself stuck, my story had a 'and then, and then, and then' quality, and I couldn't simplify the message of my story into a sentence, I couldn't really figure out what message I really wanted to convey with this idea, and I hoped that trying to draw out what was in my head would help, but I couldn't organise my ideas very well.

I was struggling with the story of my animation, so I tried to visualise my lab/experiment idea by drawing a small comic expressing that the character can change into different things, but was not allowed to change into anything other than what the screen tells them they can change into. I ended up using this cute style of drawing later on in my designs as Alan said that they have a more relatable look and that people watching will feel more sympathy for the character.

I drew this picture when I was really struggling with what I wanted the animation to look like, so I just drew whatever I was picturing in my head. This page is a little chaotic, but it helped me to realise that I needed to look into the basic shape of my character rather than trying to go into too much detail too soon, which was one of the reasons why I was getting stuck.

As I was struggling so much with how I wanted my character to look, and also trying to develop my story into something that made sense, I drew a page of thumbnails to explore basic shapes and different ways of designing the main character. When I showed these drawings to Alan, I explained that I was finding it difficult to convey the message of not wanting to conform to mainstream expectations, and he suggested that I try and think of a different method/metaphor to base my story on. He also suggested that I could make an animation using one of the characters from this thumbnail page in a meta art vs artist type of story.

The drawing isn't happy with the artist messing around with it, it's happy with how it looks already, but the artist tries to change that. The artist goes on to fight the drawing in an attempt to alter its appearance.

I created these designs alongside the thumb-nails, I took a few of the thumbnails I really liked, and developed them a little. At this point I still wasn't sure if I was going for a very humanoid character or something more basic. I started to focus on the more basic/cute designs, as I felt that they would fit in with the story a lot better.

A sketchbook is laying on a messy artist’s desk, on the sketchbook there is a page of small thumbnail drawings. The camera zooms in so only a handful of characters can be seen.

The main character is being drawn. It is very happy with how it looks. The artist taps their fingers to visualise that they aren’t too happy with the drawing.

The artist starts to rub out the drawing, as the character is being rubbed out it yelps in shock. It grabs the pencil from the artist and redraws itself quickly.

The artist tries to rub out the character again, but the character hurries past the other drawings and leaps onto another page of the sketchbook.

(Or, the artist manages to rub out just the legs of the drawing, the drawing takes the legs off of another thumbnail drawing and flees.)

The artist catches the character and rubs it out and redraws them to look very curvy and feminine.

The character is offended and stomps their foot. They grab the pencil off of the artist and redraw themselves (very shakily/badly) to look roughly how they were before. They sigh.

The artist tries to rub out the character again, but it kicks the rubber away.

The artist rather impatiently grabs a paint brush/ink brush and paints over the character, but it shakes off the ink/paint in a wet dog kind of motion. Paint splatters now cover the artist’s hands and their desk.

The artist bangs their hand down on the table in anger. The main character falls over and shivers with fear. They run to the corner of the page and try to turn it to escape but they fail.

The artist uses their finger to drag the character back to the middle of the page. They sternly point their finger at the character in a ‘stay put’ motion.

The character acts defeated. The artist rubs the character again, but this time, draws to character to look extremely masculine (big muscles, big shoulders etc.)

The main character slumps to the floor and starts to cry.

The artist panics and draws them a slice of cake to try and cheer them up, but the character pushes it away and turns away from the artist.

They try to stroke the character, but it hits their hand away.

The artist pauses, and starts rubbing out the character. The character stops crying.

The artist draws them again. The character slowly gets up to reveal that the artist has drawn them to look how they originally looked.

The character looks at their body, It jumps with delight and hugs the artists finger, making the artist drop their pencil, and the artist pats the character affectionately.

The artist takes their hand away and waves to the character, the character waves back too and the artist slowly closes the sketchbook.

The character pops its arm out to give one final wave.

I drew out two storyboards exploring how I could begin my animation. In the first storyboard, the main character gets half of their body rubbed out, this alarms all of the other thumbnail drawings and they flee the page, leaving the main character by themselves. My worry with this idea was that I would have to animate all of the characters, but the difficulty of this all depends on how I’m going to animate them. For the side characters, I could use either 2D or 3D animation.

This piece of concept art shows the main character and the artist interacting. I really want my animation to have an ‘Art vs Artist’ feel to it so I thought I’d draw some concept art showing that. I also included part of the artists desk in the frame which is something I’d like to explore more in terms of what I would like the composition to look like.

I took some of the designs I liked from the previous developments and added facial features. I wanted to experiment with different eye shapes and mouths. I wanted to see if the character even needs eyes and a mouth, and I felt like the character looks better without a mouth. I think that without eyes, the character loses a lot of emotion. I like thumbnails 2, 3, 8, and 21 the best, and I feel either indifferent or unhappy with the rest. Some look rather scary in my opinion. I think simple is better when adding facial features as the shape of the character is also very simple.

These are rough concepts for the artist character in my animation. I chose not to give them a head/face because I didn't want them to have an obvious identity as this character is based on myself.

My project is a personal story to me that I have adapted into an animation that other people can relate to or just find entertaining. I also wanted to make it more obvious that the sketch is their main character of the animation, and that the story is about the sketch struggling with its identity/ not wanting to conform to the artist's ideas.

The setting of my animation is the artist's bedroom/study so I wanted to design the artist in comfy clothes. As the artist is based on myself I designed outfits based on the clothes I wear at home. I'm leaning towards the comfy clothes design (T-shirt and Shorts) Concepts as they read as comfy clothes, without looking too much like pajamas. I feel like the dressing gown design and the pajama shirt designs are a little too much and makes it look like the artist is about to go to sleep rather than sit down and do some drawing.

Something I realized while drawing my first storyboard was that the hands looked really bad, so I took some photos of my hand in different poses I thought would fit in with my animation and used them as drawing references for this set of hand studies. This really helped when I was drawing my cleaned up storyboard.

I drew a few concepts for the sketchbook as I hadn't figured out what kind of book I wanted the sketchbook to be. I'm still not sure about these concepts but I'm leaning more towards the black sketchbook as it's simple. I also like the blue and pink sketchbook as it's simple but still has a nice pop of colour.

I played around in Adobe Animate and created a small animation of the main character of my premise project. It's been a while since I've used 2D Animation software so it was a little challenging to create this animation. I decided to choose some of my storyboards as a reference as I thought it was important to create my animation tests based on scenes that might be in the final product.

I found this process challenging and time-consuming. I kept changing the proportions of the character and everything in general looked a bit sloppy and messy. I think a sketchy/messy look could fit the aesthetic of my film quite nicely, but it still needs to look somewhat more polished and smooth. I have chosen to not go forward with using 2D animation as I want to really focus on 3D animation and looking into how 3D animation can be made to look 2D.

On the left are some stills from my revised storyboards that I went on to use in my animatic.

These are some of my favourite shots.