Return Of Doodle Pad: Apprentice And Creature Concepts

When we initially went about concepting the apprentice, we envisioned that he/she would be of a lower class and lower (smaller) stature to the hunter. In other words he/she would be more of a servant or slave to the hunters biddings, who would look frail and quite young. I had the idea in mind that he would act as the pack horse for all of the hunters gear and follow him out in the field, hoping to learn as much as he can to get higher up in life, but at the same time being fairly miserable doing it.

For most of the visual design of the apprentice, credit is given to Jake Jones for his development of this character

concept work

all concept work by Jake Jones

Some Concept Sculpts

colour concepts

Apprentice

For any information on the modeling stage of the apprentice please take a look at Matt Luxton's Blog

Creature (AKA BAP)

The creature has proven the most difficult character to convey in this project, as the animal must look and perform as both cute and comical. The setting for this project is in a an alien jungle and as such the creature is also alien, so anything goes, but for the sake of familiarity we have tried to come up with something that compares with agile creature you may find on earth. For instance we looked at squirrels, stoats, weasels and small monkeys and came up with some concepts:

credit is given to Emma Taylor and Tom Dowler for there designs and development of this character

Artwork by Tom Dowler

Artwork by Emma Taylor

creature sculpts

It came to the situation where the creature designs just weren't hitting the right note, it felt as though the creature was still too cute, too crafted for survival, I wanted to think in terms of, if were to come across it in the wild, you would wonder how it even lasted a day. I had a brain wave when I took a look at an image of Bobby Chiu's work: