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My first concrete step in this project was to create objects I would be reusing in each of the letter forms. Every letter would have 2 eyes and one pair of pants, to tie them all together into one cohesive group of letters. I did this in Illustrator for both sections. For the eyes I created one large circle with a smaller, filled circle in the middle to be a pupil. I wanted to give some character to the eyes so I also included some with furrowed brows and also droopy eyelids. The eyelids were trick because I had to basically put a green square over the eyes, then use the divide function to divide all the lines in the image, and cancel out all the green spaces that weren’t needed, resulting in the droopy eye figure. For the pants I had to join a couple of rounded rectangles together to give the arch-like shape of pants, then for the belt loop I made a small, brown, rounded rectangle, and copied that image multiple times along the same axis to give the illusion of belt loops. The shoes were basically a free-form drawing of cartoony shoes that I just attached at the end of the pant legs. I played around with the image until I got 4 different ‘body-shaped’ pants.

I should probably begin this post by saying that this project was in many ways a nightmare and an adventure. The nightmare began when I realized this project would involve me form fitting 26 individual pairs of pants to 26 unique characters, some of which do not have bodies that lend themSelveS to being wearers of pants. Thankfully my burden was lessened just by having 4 different body-shaped pants to work with. One of the biggest challenges I found with the pants was adjusting the belts and belt loops on each pants whenever they would be stretched out beyond their original dimension. Originally I wanted to just add belt loops for wide waisted individuals, but because of how I originally sculpted the pants, this made that endeavor nearly impossible, so I opted to just space the existing loops farther apart from each other, which I think was a better choice looking back. I started by making the vowels first, and then moved onto the consonants, which might be apparent if you look closer at the designs for letter A and letter M or even W. Originally I would mold the letter to fit the pants, but I found that fitting the pants to the letter form yielded a more organic figure. For the animated portion of this assignment, I was going to spell out HELLO and have the letters bend and bob like they were dancing, but with time constraints and my dwindling patience, I opted to just spell WAVY and have the letters go up and down in a wave.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Link to native build files: HERE

posterAlphabet
Bibliography

Cromar, William. “a2ZAlphabetBlog.” NewMediaWiki [Licensed for Non-Commercial Use Only] / a2ZAlphabetBlog, 2020, newmediawiki.pbworks.com/w/page/127847631/a2ZAlphabetBlog#Alphabetblog.

In this last session of sketches I’ve come to a better sense of what I want my letter theme to be. After some more mindless doodling I found a more coherent idea that each of the letters can be a part of, and that is letter-shaped monsters wearing jeans and boots.

In the image below you will see a rough concept of mine to recreate the alphabet, but themed as little ‘characters’ (get it?). In some spare time I turned the critical section of my brain off, and just let my marker roam free on a whiteboard, just to see what I would come up with. During that session I went through the first 9 letters on the alphabet, and I feel that the top row of letters have a stronger design than the bottom row. In particular I would say the letters C and E are probably my favorites from that session and those two will likely be changed the least when compared to their inevitable final form. My biggest hurdle right now is to select a more concrete theme with the characters. Right now they are somewhere in between monsters and oddly shaped office workers. Some letters lend themselves more towards monsters while others lean towards the office workers idea. For instance the letters B and F clearly are creatures found in a cubicle, while C and H are more mythical in design. Essentially I chose to go this route because I usually find myself doodling weird creatures whenever my mind wanders and I felt this project would be an interesting outlet for the mental oddities bouncing around my brain.