Anthropomorphism: experimentation with another new direction

Wanting to be as exhaustive as possible with my character development I decided to revisit the initial project briefing and see what aspects/avenues of character design I was yet to touch upon. The use of anthropomorphism immediately caught my attention as I though it would allow me to further continue the weird, slightly disturbing aesthetic I've had with my previous designs. 

Particularly I am interested in how combining my more gangly, stretching  with bird features may lead to even weirder out comes as I feel the two would compliment each other well in order to further this aesthetic.

Penny Davenport

Although her process is very different to mine in that most of her work uses the incredibly time consuming techniques of speckling and cross hatching, I found Penny Davenport's work highly relevant to the sorts of characters I was trying to create. Although on a base level this was due her incorporation of anthropomorphic bird characters it was also due to the wonky, disjointed appearance of her characters limbs/body parts. This is something I have been playing around with and it is great to see how she has managed to create really engaging characters full of life and personality despite the 'wrongness' of their anatomy.

Out of the initial designs I came up with under this theme I liked the tallk totemesque birds the most. This was due to, as stated in regards to Penny Davenport's work, how biologically they would make no sense in the really word. Imagining them trying to fly or carry out other simple movements could potential work well in a gif.

However I was still interested in furthering the long limbed characters I had previously created so I decided to create a series of similar characters with the heads of birds or wearing bird masks. Again found not drawing in all the elements of the face added to the unsettling feel of the characters as I feel the top right and bottom left, both of which have eyes, mouth and nose, appear a lot more friendly and human the the other three.

In particularly there is a disconcerting sense of silence with the bottom two which I think is partly due to their resemblance to the bird masks worn by plague doctors in the sixteen hundreds. This is a good example of how drawing on parts of our shared history/collective conscience can be used to further what I am trying to achieve visually and should definitely be remembered when approaching other tasks as for the most part I tend to over look its power.