My first task was to look at the anatomy of a bird. I was not strong at drawing birds as it was not something I have had much experience in. I wanted to truly understand birds and their forms before I tried to simplify and characterise one.
I knew that I wanted this bird to feel like a wild and street weathered species so it would contrast well with the elegant and tamed caged bird in the gardens. The perfect bird to get this across for me was the gull. It has a cheeky, mysterious and slightly malevolent nature that was perfect for the bird I wanted. I started looking at traditional sea gulls for inspiration.
I then decided that the sea gull was too clean a look for my bird and i didn't want that separated clean lines of the feather pattern and the crisp white coat. I did some more research on gull species and discovered the brown spotted gull which had a much more mottled and scruffy pattern which was perfect for the weathered and worn bird. I used these photos as research and reference for my designs.
I also wanted to look at the birds wings to grasp how it would work and fly. I think in depths research would be crucial for my animation and designs to be accurate and correct.
It was now time to start designing the gull character. Shown below is my first design which was more of a realistic study of the gulls found in my research that would allow me to work out shapes and the complexities of the bird in order to later simplify it.
I then started to simplify these designs into more of a characterised bird. At this stage however I was knee to retain a lot of the realism, particularly the proportions in order to make the gull instantly recognisable as a bird.
I liked the last design I had drawn and wanted to take that further and simplify it further if possible. Below is a more simple bird design and on the right is an attempt at trying t push the key features such as the curved wings and the long thin bird legs which were aspects of the bird I liked.
I now had a few more realistic designs for the bird and took the opportunity to start pushing the designs and take a more stylised and exaggerated approach. Shown below are a few sketches where I am simplifying the gull into shapes such as circles and triangles.
I then pushed these even further to get almost characetures of the bird. I was pushing the proportions to unrealistic places.
I had taken the designs a bit too far and wanted to bring it back a little bit. I really liked a couple of the pushed designs however and wanted to retain a bit of that character. Shown below are my attempts at taking that design and keeping the simple stylised approach but putting back the realistic proportions. The design on the right has strayed far from a gull species and this would kill my film so I decided I needed to readdress my approach to the designs.
I went back to the drawing board and felt like I never quite captured the face and the menacing feel that gulls have. I did some studies of gulls heads.
I was able to simplify the iconic gull eye into a simple shape that worked well and did another design that retained more realism and added the stuff I had learned from the head studies.
Shown below is my final design. I had refined everything I had learned from y previous designs and put them into this. I had the realistic proportions of the gull but with simplified details so it would be easy to draw and animate.
My final gull design:
