Character Design and how bacon saves lives

First, bacon saved our lives this week. Seriously. It was one of those weeks on the semester where everything comes due all at once right after one of those hellish weeks where you slipped just far enough behind to feel like you'll never catch up ever again and all of a sudden you're pulling an all- nighter every other night and it's all you can do to appear mentally stable in class the next day and who can even mention actually turning in homework or taking that test?

...And so we come to bacon. That wonderful little packet of bacon that we bought as a treat a week ago, thinking nothing more of it than 'wow, last week was hectic, but we survived it, here's our reward'. Little did we know that bacon was to be our coping and survival mechanism, emotionally and it seemed physically, for the next week.

I would be up till three and have to get up at six, I would wake up to the smell of bacon frying. Martin would face down a brutal day full of angsty student teachers, pop quizzes and sudden deadlines, and come home to smell bacon.

It doesn't take much to make our whole apartment smell beautifully of frying bacon, and we've made that little packet last... but we just ate the last bite, and now all I think we can do is hope next week is not nearly so hectic.

One of the things that made this week so crazy was the fact that all of my midterms were due... split between only two days. Art midterms are a bit different from what most of you are accustomed to. In most art classes, we get projects throughout the semester, and these projects take anywhere from seven to thirty+ hours to complete. When the project comes due, we bring them into class, set them up for everyone to see, and sit down and spend the next few hours taking turns presenting our work to be analyzed, critiqued, and... kind of torn apart. In a matter-of-fact, my-turn-is-next, I-really-hope-this-helps kind of way, because then you have however long is left until midterms to fix whatever was found lacking in your piece.

You don't get a break in assignments, though. They just keep coming. Which means that uuusually most of the redoes are pushed off until the last few days before midterms and you pull several all-nighters getting all of the touch-ups, repaints, redraws, and overhauls finished just barely in time to turn them in.

Yesterday (or really, last night at midnight) the redraws of all my character designs were due. (That morning at eight it had been two other paintings for my senior studio class)

So, without further ado, here's a little peek at my character designs. Next post I'm thinking of doing a little walk-through of how I did these :)

It'll be a lot less wordy, I promise.

 An aboriginal medicine doctor. His name, we've decided, is Bric.

 A circus stilt-walker.

A villain. His name is Mathis Jostad. The prompt was to create a 'soft' villain. That was the entire prompt. Immediately I knew that for me, the most terrifying villains are the ones that are so soft spoken that the way you know you're in trouble is they get quieter and calmer the more angry or dangerously excited they get...he's one of those.