Sketches for Design Project

[kadianimation]

I'm an animation student in Vancouver and I am currently working on a model pack for my final project in my design class and i need a bit of help. I need to make mine extremely cohesive and pleasing since i am also entering my portfolio in a scholarship contest offered by Studio B in partnership with my school. Its $2000 dollars and at least a month in the summer of an internship so its pretty important that I do my best. That being said, I'm currently working on getting a solid design of one of my main characters, Ebony Black.

Here are the sketches thus far (i have a lot more, they just haven't been scanned in... about 20 or 30 pages of previous sketches that don't exactly fit in anymore, since i made these new sketches from the old sketches, if that makes any sense)

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y245/Shimoyo/ebonysketches.jpg

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y245/Shimoyo/ebonyconcept.jpg

and this is another character in the story, Ebony's evil mother, Kellan:

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y245/Shimoyo/sidra.jpg

I need to work more on her mother to make her look more evil an more of a cross between medusa and a stone statue( story behind her is that she is the evil queen from the snow white stories and is pulled across time in to this fantastical library, but something unfortunate happens and only half her soul gets through. She merges with the body of a gorgon at the prompting of the Tyrant of Type and forgets what being a gorgon means, since she looks in to her magic mirror and thus gazes in to her own eyes. That's why she's half stone)

PS i realize kellan (crap name that needs to be changed) has a wonking leg in the background... i was experimenting and it didn't exactly work out well. Doing a project the night before class=not a smart idea

any help with silhouettes, and which direction you could offer me to go in would be very much appreciated. The other characters will be up shortly, as i draw them.

Thanks a bunch in advance! last time i posted her i learned a LOT and i use everything that you guys offer to me.

Thankies!!!

Kadi

[EmiR]

hi,
i see, you control the cahracter and the colors are great.
only one question: why all of your characters look in a corner?

[masque]

re: Ebony Black -- there's a wide range of interpretations possible for the character sketches, so without some sort of brief on what you're aiming at it's hard to critique their effectiveness. aside from that, i think they're well-done, lots of life and solid gesturals, good starting points.

for Kellan, i think the alterations from the classical Gorgon look may be problematic -- i like the shift of the snakes to her hand but i'm not sure it says "gorgon" strongly enough to convince everyone. maybe this is story-dependent.

you use some painterly strokes in her coloring, so i suggest you extend their use to texturize the stone portions -- they shouldn't have the same sheen as skin. and the patchiness of the stone areas is disconcerting, tends to make it look like a coating on her, maybe a paint job. perhaps the part of her affected could be contiguous, but asymmetrical -- like only a portion of her face, extending down the neck and shoulder and arm all the way to her hand, as if she'd turned away at the mirror but not quite in time and only part of her was cursed.

she looks pretty evil and very calculating as is, but her bat wings and devil's tail don't buy you anything imo. they seem like overkill.