Final Zipa!!

So I realized I never posted my final Zipa character. This was my first experience with it and I'm pretty happy with it. I developed him pretty early on which I think gave me the upper hand with him.  This was a really big learning experience for me as well.

A New Leaf: A New York Flower Shop

For 117b, our latest assignment was creating a flower shop and it's owner from the 1980's New York. It was definitely challenging to make the city feel like New York. New York has so much character and quirk that you know it when you see it.  So getting that feel was hard.

I really wanted to get funky shapes in and bring a 1990's Nickelodeon feel to it. 

After critiques, my teacher liked these two the best. 

For the next pass, I worked out some colors and some ideations for store fronts. 

Unlike the zipa project where I felt like I got a grasp on my character pretty quick, I struggled with this one.  Ultimately, I chose a character who was an ironic flower shop owner.

The inside of the flower shop was a whole other beast to tackle. Filling the space and making it fit the size of the front were some challenges.

To help with the inside of the flower shop, I built a Maya proxy.

This model helped quite a bit in realizing my space. Here on the bottom I tried to work out some color pallets and lighting.

I was still having trouble with my lighting, so I built the exterior in Maya as well and played around with the physical Sun and Lighting settings. 

Since I had a character who looked like he belonged working in a creepy photo studio rather than a flower shop, I needed to come up with a story for him. So I invented his wife, Edith. They never had any children, and therefore she treated her flower shop as her own child. When she passed, Harold ( my little guy), didn't want to lose the memory of her so he kept the flower shop going. 

So here on top are some story moments from Harold's life.  On the bottom is a first pass for the interior of my shop. The lighting is all over the place and it feels really glum. That needed to be fixed.

The exterior was feeling better, but needed some more details and stronger warms in the lighting. 

Finals: I decided I wanted the interior of the shop to feel sad after Edith's passing. Without her, it was no longer a happy place.

Harold has definitely seen better days, but here he is sporting his late wife's apron and trying to make it through each day.

Adding the warm oranges to this shot really brought it home. I'm happy with this piece tho style wise I miss the lining drawing in it.