More Basil

Here are a few more sketches of Basil Fawlty.
After hours and hours of drawing this man, I've reached the point I was so desperate to get to - the point where I can draw him without even thinking. Of course, the animated Basil will be much simpler, but it will be based on the same sets of instructions I now instinctively give myself when drawing him. Hopefully, when it comes to the animation, all I will have to think about is his performance.

An attempt at some sort o performance template.

The montage of actions at the top of this picture weren't meant to be a sequence, but they marry together so well I might use them as templates for keyframes in a separate bit of non-spoken character animation.

Basil's cracked! I really want the face on the left to make an appearance, in some form, in my final showreel.

The bottom two images here are among my favourites. They pretty much sum up my enthusiasm and how good I want this to look. Animating something with this much detail is unlikely, but it's nicer having to rein in your ideas than starting with something that needs improvement.

The darkest Basil here was a test to see if I could replicate the roundedness of vector imagery in biro. Trying it the other way around - sketchy expressiveness in Flash - is tricky, but I wanted to at least reach that middle point so I had something to work with, something to enhance my Flash drawing. This drawing helps provide that link.

By the time I'd filled this page, I more or less knew I'd reached the point where Basil was coming instinctively to me. I was in a pub when I did this.