"Career Advice" Character designs

One of the projects more suited to my tastes was the "Career Advice" project, where we had to pick three professions out of a hat, creating interesting characters to go along with them. Mine were Lumberjack, Musician and Falconer, all of which I looked forward to making! It also seemed the previous project, Four Word Phrases inspired me down the anthropomorphic road! I got the idea of my Lumberjack being against the stereotype and made her female, and when thinking of an animal I could do her as, a bear fit the picture perfectly! They are large like stereotypical Lumberjack men, and hairy too! Making a female lumberjack bear was one of my fave developments of this project. As my name suggests, I absolutely love foxes. A sleazy fox musician, inspired by the wolfs in the movies "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" seemed like the right path to follow!! It is hard to choose a fave between the two, to be honest. I love the designs and personalities behind them; my powerful, flirty but with a good sense of humor Lumberjack bear-girl and my sleazy  cunning but reliable fox-man musician! For my falconer, I looked at the gear, which was all leather clad - I found out the birds have small, leather helmet type articles, so it seemed great for Vanessa (my falconer - a woman, again) to have one too! In the final design it is a leather clad mask with matching armor ensemble  but in the design works it was a gas mask! I love the fact that she is clad in armour, but still looks feminine. 

These are my development sketches for each character. I feel the Lumberjack got the most development, since she was the hardest to draw; I have drawn human woman and foxes before, but never bears!

Weird Fact: Vanessa is the masked Falconer superhero of her town. By day, she works at a bird sanctuary. A falcon at the sanctuary named poppy, is the one who joins her on her quest to rid the world of thieves and such.

Below is the final paintings of these three characters; the Musician is done in gouache, my first ever use of the media, which i found to be difficult - adding too much water caused tears in the card stock I was working on, which caused me to start over again! However, I do now love gouache - I love the smooth effect you can accomplish with this media. To describe it best, people who I know who have used it prier to myself say it is a media between watercolour (due to the use of water with the media) and acrylics (with the colours being vibrant, but smoother and not as thick.) The other two were done with acrylics, a media which I am used to - its vibrant colours are on par with that of my gouache musician, which is good - they match while being in different medias. I'm not as pleased with the final outcomes as I would have liked to have been; none of them seem correct, not as they were as sketches in my book. I feel the musician's face needed more work, and the eyes are off, as is the head shape. The falconer's pose is all wrong which causes her body to look twisted and unproportional - she was original designed with a abnormal thin waist, but with this pose it looks even thinner than before! Creating fur for the Lumberjack was hard, and for the effort put it, I feel it should have been more successful - and her axe, ahhhh! It's colouring was too plain and boring, plus I did the oversized axe too big in the final, even more so than intended! In terms of character design, personality and choice of media, I feel it was a success, but the finals to not do these guys justice!