Term 2 - Week 7 - Anthropomorphic Exotic Frog-Man Design

This week we were to design a character combining a human with an exotic frog. First as always starts with a mood board:

This week I mainly looked at real frogs, mainly for the colours and eyes. Before we started our design we had to think of a target audience and profession/occupation for our character. When I mentioned this to my girlfriend, she immediately replied: 'I always thought frogs would be scientists'. I could see what she meant, and I wanted to go in the direction of mad scientist. Maybe horror genre, or maybe a grittier graphic novel type character. Perhaps a hero/anti-hero which has been transformed into a frog during an experiment.

So I went in that direction with my initial ideas:

The first image is just the standard scientist. A bit of a boring image I thought, even though it portrays the thin stature that a frog man might have. I thought the head and hands were too small, also was just dull. I tried to remedy that for the second design. I thought of the second one as a crazed scientist, maybe after turning into this creature, perhaps swinging from a pipe or something. For the third I wanted to try something a little different, perhaps the scientist was disfigured while turned into a frog, more like an abomination. I made one arm more powerful and bulky, with the other short and weak. I also made one eye large and the second small and blind to increase the look of craziness.

I really enjoyed this final design, I'm a sucker for a good pose, but combining that with the misshapen figure, then I was going to continue with that for the final design.

I masked out some areas and cleaned up the edges. I also started a new details layer where I wanted to add the remnants of clothes from when he was a fully human scientist. Ripped lab coat and broken spectacles which he still clutches.

At this stage I wanted to try the video technique of pasting images onto the design and using the colours and shapes from that to create the final piece. It's kind of obvious which image I went with! I used that frog for the head and limbs, and a different one for the chest colour. Used a denim sample for the jeans and blended some of the colours to finish the final paint. I left the lines in because it didn't hold up without them and to do so would have taken a lot longer.

Pleased with how it turned out, and pleased that I continued my streak and managed to do this quite quickly from start to finish!