more cartooning ideas for Juneau

I watch my little dog everyday and she’s become such a familiar face that it’s hard for me to portray her. I also feel like there are a billion different options for cartooning styles. Every now and again, I’ll sit at my desk and doodle her for effect, thinking about how to simplify her behavior and quirks. Once I get the “character board” down, I want to work on creating the art form; making her move on paper and speak with pen strokes. This post contained phase one, remember these?

Here are the new one’s (or some rather). Disney style (just for a laugh, because I’d hate to copycat Balto):

these next two happened and the look more like pig and terrier. O’well, I’m experimenting, it doesn’t matter.

A few sketches happened one piece of paper- Juneau with eyelashes, skinny snouted Juneau, buggeyed cartoon Juneau.

then I realized that none of these look remotely like Juneau, but this one really hits home. Why? For starters, I was messing up her ears earlier. She also sits like this all the time, and the blank eyes give me that cold husky stare (but I’d probably fill them with color, one blue /one brown.) I think I have one thing to work with for now. Where I go beyond this point will probably be derived from this Juneau:

Unless Juneau starts giving me any insight.

Another thing I am doing is studying her movements. Call it a self taught animation series but it’s the beginning of a project I’ve had in mind for some time now. Hopefully you’ll be around to see it launch!

I’ve always been fascinated by animation. Freshman year of high school, I made a whole sequence of a horse running and jumping at three different angels. I drew each sequence on tracing paper so I could reference the movement before. I found a few of them in my old sketchbook so I’ll put a few here…they are on tracing paper and in a very rough form.  I wish I still had the video where I choppily strung them together so you could see, but it perished in the grave of old computerland. My over ambitious little self had wanted to see it the whole way out, but I never got around to cell shading them in the computer for a finished product.

The first one is the character sheet, all of my proportions where made from this drawing.

To get the movements/ gaits right, I spent time watching the horses next to my grandparents farm as well as looking up gait studies that other people had drawn. Juneau runs entirely different from a horse of course, but I’d like to do the whole gait study with her and improve on things like skin movement and weight shifts.

And yes, you may be wondering why I need to further animate my dog when I already have every little thing captured by camera. I’m just weird like that.