Character analysis Mrs. Brisby

Today is  alittle bit different. After getting a critique on some character designs I did for Anthony's class last night I decided to return to analyzing and understanding simpler designs in the form of animation and looking at animation sheets. The goal I'm going for is to begin working on my character designs specifically for my comic so the designs I need to look at need to be more simplistic and less character illustrations that I was doing before. Doing character designs that are super detailed is beside the point when it comes to doing comic work. 

So here lets take this piece, which is related to a current freelance work I'm doing and talk about what we see here. In the photo we see the model sheet of the character and a breakdown of the head of the character Mrs. Brisby. We notice firs that he starts with an oval shape that connects to the nose. The nose connection is placed at eyelevel which is halfway down the skull. As we follow the steps he attaches the ears which seem to actually be more on the back of the head and not as much overlap[ as one would think. 

The curve of the ears is similar to the curve of the head and we can see notes here of how the hair itself sits on the top of the head. The artist makes note not to let the hair have too many strands otherwise it interupts the shape of the skull. After adding the hair on the head and the two ears we get other landmarks of the face such as where the cheeks are and the mouth that is extend out from the bottom of the shape of the skull. 

We then turn our attention to the ruffle of hair on the side of the head which as it breaks away from the skull it begins in the opposite direction before correction and we get a stairway of small, medium and large hair shapes the follow the same curve of the ears as they go upward. We see these notes here along the final illustration on the right of mrs brisby. 

Here in this final analysis of the notes we confirm what we saw in the profile, that all the hair on the sides of the head are aiming us upward giving us a curving motion towards the head to the ears and the ears sit pretty much center stage on the head. The eyes slant upwards slightly and this gives the overall image a very cute feel.