early concept sketches

I chose to focus on Degas painting called ballet dancer as the springboard for my final project. The brief of the project being to create a short animated film based on a painting in the National Gallery. These are a few of the concept sketches I began with as a gut reaction to this theme. Ultimately, it would be a learning process from here on. First of all, I wanted to see what my preconceptions, if any, of ballet dancers were. So I began sketching from memory and imagination and produced a number of sketches. The three I posted here show the direction I was heading in... what I learned from doing these few sketches is that, to me, one aspect of ballet that distinguishes it from other dance forms is the gracefulness of the movements. I know this is quite obvious, most people know this about ballet, but it would prove to be an important factor that would influence each stage of the project, from character designs to techniques of animation used. What I eventually decided on as the story for the animation would be: based inside a ballet studio, typical teacher/student scenario. Ha! It was a bit of a mission deciding who would be who. First I decided on the student being the large one and the teacher being the slim one. Then I reversed it but went back to the original idea. The story is not directly based on the painting, but without that painting as a springboard I dont think I would have ended up with the same plot. I particularly felt the sketch done using pastel (one of Degas favourite medium) appealed to me the most. I then thought about why I liked it, and realised the flow of the line was interesting. This then led me to check out Al Hirscfeld who I knew capitalised on this technique(more on him in later post:)