Cockatiels and Miniature Schnauzers, oh my!

This project was a fun one, especially considering how much I love animals (and drawing them). I had to design 2 characters that would interact, one being a bird and the other a four legged animal of my choice, and since I have both a pet cockatiel and a dog I decided to make them in to animatable characters!

I started with the bird character, who is based on my own cockatiel Jessie (who is a lovely model to work with, by the way).

Before I could even think of designing my own bird character I had to practice a lot with reference, so I gathered up a lot of research and started drawing cockatiels to get a feel of their anatomy and shape.

Doodling out these silhouettes was definitely a fun experience! I wanted to play around and stretch proportions as much as possible to see what I could do.

Once I was comfortable with the anatomy, I began experimenting with different styles to see what I could do with the character.

After finding the right style for the character (simple and easy shapes so redrawing the character over and over would be easier) I decided on colours and began working out the personality of the bird.

Cockatiel crests are very expressive, so I played around with it a lot when I got to the expression sheet!

The only things left to do was finalise the design and create a turnaround.

One the bird was done and dusted I moved on to the four-legged animal character, specifically a dog. Even more specifically, a Miniature Schnauzer based on my own dog, Wilson.

Just as I did with Jessie I took a lot of photos of Wilson and used him as reference when I began sketching out ideas.

Once I knew how to draw schnauzers properly I began working out the anatomy and proportions of my dog character until I was finally satisfied with the result.

With his proportions down I moved on to his personality, deciding he would be the complete opposite of my bouncy, peppy bird. Schnauzers already look like grumpy old men so I just made him even more grumpy and old looking! 

And this was the final result!

For the final promo I put the two characters together in a scene to show how they interact with eachother. My dog really doesn't like my cockatiel one bit....