Inspirations (including those listed below) include: the Pokémon Anime Series, Richard Williams "The Thief and the Cobbler", Yves Bourg "Supercrash" (www.supercrash.net, thebourgyman.deviantart.com) and Bill Watterson "Calvin and Hobbes".
This is the first ever drawing of Evee and Bentley: a doodle in the computer art program Paint. The style was my own, but as a whole inspired from the Pokémon anime cartoons from my childhood.
These are the first drawings of Evee and Bentley I did by hand, based off the one I did on the computer.
An older Evee.
This style for Evee and Bentley was inspired by Richard William's "The Thief and the Cobbler"
This style is based on the cartoons of the 1920s. It was very fun to draw, and its role in the development of the characters was substantial as it helped construct a simpler design for Evee and Bentley.
This was an attempt to make Evee younger, smaller and simpler to draw.
This is a character based on Evee and Bentley, although the incarnation of Bentley is not in fact alive, making the main focus the superhero girl. This was inspired by the comic "Supercrash" by Yves Bourg. (www.supercrash.net)
Where and how did you get your ideas?
Evee and Bentley are characters I had invented a while ago, purely for my own amusement – a girl who owned a scarf that could move on their own like a pair of arms: an idea I thought was pretty entertaining. Immediately I wanted to make the scarf have a personality of its own, so Evee could have an emotional bond with her scarf – inspired much by creations such as Phillip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy – as well as to make the scarf more interesting. More inspiration for Bentley came from a fascination with ghosts and the ability ghosts are claimed to have: possessing (or being spiritually tied down to) an object.
As soon as I started the animation course, I thought that Evee with Bentley could be quite interesting to animate, and I had tonnes of ideas and situations that a girl with a living, moving scarf could get into. This inspired my idea for a “day in the life” of Evee and Bentley: an unusual pair of best friends with a bizarre ability.
Evee was originally a character based on myself, but evolved into her own person with separate traits and individuality. I also made her a lot younger than me: in the animation she is twelve years old, mainly to increase the variety of situations that could occur (such as playing catch, and encountering school bullies).
What research have you done?
Because Evee and Bentley was basically planned out in my head way before the animation course had begun, so not much research was needed to be done. However, much research on how to animate the piece was done, such as walk cycles (studied by reading “The Animator’s Survival Kit” by Richard Williams), due to being an inexperienced animator.Why are research and drawing skills important to the animation development process?
If I had done no research on how to animate things that I had no knowledge on animating, my animation could have been at a much poorer standard. If I had a complete lack of drawing skills, the designing of Evee and Bentley, the animatic and of course the animation itself would have been impossible to go about doing. There is a huge reliance on at least some drawing skill and initiative in order to be able to successfully develop and execute a piece of hand-drawn animation.
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