Animal Farm sheep designs

For one of our projects in class, we did some character designs as though we were making a movie of George Orwell's Animal Farm. We were to choose an artist and work as though that artist were the fictional production's style guide. I chose Edward Gorey because I thought his Edwardian-inspired charm could really help accentuate the critique of Stalinist Russia while still allowing enough appeal and alleviating some of the horrors of the story. I chose to design the donkey Benjamin, Snowball of the pigs, and sheep. In this post, I'll just describe the process I used for the sheep design.

First, because I didn't really know how sheep are built, I drew (pages and pages of) sheep studies :


From these drawings, I tried to come up with different stylizations of sheep in the spirit of Edward Gorey:


It was fun to see the different variations I could come up with. But ultimately, because the sheep is a multiplicity character, that is instead of being a single individual character the sheep were always seen in a group and chorusing their half-baked lines, I chose a simpler design that wouldn't be as distracting when seen in multiples. The sheep character is also one that is easily misled and brainwashed, so I chose a design that looked like it had the least thought process going on behind its eyes for the final.

I wanted to do some expression studies and pose studies to make sure my design was flexible enough to accomplish them:


As I worked on these character designs, I realized how much of what Edward Gorey was about was in his wonderful tableaus with awkward situations accentuated by single line sentences that emphasized the awkwardness below. Just for kicks, I wanted to follow this spirit with a tableau of my own for the character line-up: