Playing Favourites

While I suppose the character designs have already been established in the previous two posts' worth of concept art, I thought it'd be a grand ol' idea to throw in some of the various alternate designs for the four main players. This stage of pre-production was one of my favourites as I got to discriminately choose which were the best-looking characters to keep. It's like adoption, or more specifically, celebrity adoption. The fuglies don't stand a chance.
Of course all my characters are pretty grotesque, in this instance my goal was to pick out the least shoddily drawn ones. In all of these images the chosen designs of the batch are the ones on the bottom far right.
For the child character I wanted something that suggested a degree of antisocial awkwardness. This is easier to show in boys but I threw a couple girls in as well. Ultimately the androgyny of a kid meant there was no specification as to whether it be a boy or girl, but neither girl made the final cut. Guys rule.
The very early doodles on which the film's story was predicated upon saw both the child and hunter with very generic designs. The hunter especially was predictably barrel-chested and plaid-clad, with a chiselled jawline and so forth. This went down like a lead balloon and so I decided to run the gamut of class, creed and physique in a search for a less obvious 'hunter' look. The guy I chose has a sort of scrawny, try-hard vibe about him which I think goes nicely with the compensatory hunter lifestyle. Although I think I'll give the poor prick a shirt...
Ah, prospective lays. Y'know, the ones that could slip out of your fingers at any second? You don't? I guess that just happens to me.
Anyhow, the vital scene that severs all civility between hunter and duck depends on a reasonably pretty female character ditching the former for the latter. Now my characters aren't attractive, they're kind of awkwardly-doodled mishmashes of key features, so to sell 'pretty' is kinda tricky. As with the hunter design I decided to just churn out a bunch of widely-ranging plain Janes. The chosen design sort of teeters on that borderline of 'classy' and 'easy', which suits the character down to the ground. All that friggin' work and she has, like, three lines of dialogue in the whole thing.
Now the duck...well, this was obviously the most fun to do because I got to draw a bunch of dead, stitched-together animals, and as such there was a lot less restriction with the design. As pictured the character models range from surly to threatening to cheesey and out'n'out creepy. What I really wanted to have was an image that was a little bit disgusting and visceral, but also sort of retain the cuteness of an anthropomorphised duck. The closest I got to that was the chosen design, who I've since become enamoured of. I need to get more sunlight.
So as these designs were all mulled over and ruled out long before I posted this entry, it may seem moot to bring it up. But I wanted to document a key stage of preproduction and also show that I didn't just pull the chosen designs out of my beautiful, beautiful ass.