Lyme Regis

Especially when working on projects that are set on a specific place and time period, research is KEY. These are some of the sketches I've been working on to learn more about the town where Mary Anning lived (Lyme Regis, England) back in the XIXth century: its props, buildings, vehicles, the fashion of its people... I still have tons to learn and practice while working on some key moments of the story and secondary characters for my personal project "Anning's fossil depot" but I'm loving the ride! I feel so thankful to be able to learn something new about the world every day through my sketches :.)

Tray

Here's "Tray": the little spaniel dog that faithfully accompanied Mary Anning throughout all her excursions around the cliffs of Lyme Regis. Searching for fossils and climbing the cliffs was a very hardcore and dangerous task, so much so that the real Tray sadly died in a rockfall that also almost killed Mary in 1833. It was heartbreaking to read her letters about that time in her biography and I wanted to portray that dangerous element of their job including a little bandaid on Tray's leg (as if it wasn't the first time they encountered dangers before). 

Mary Anning's turnaround

Turnarounds are always such a daunting task but such an important one for keeping consistency on the model throughout the posing process + they're key information for the departments that come after us (modellers, riggers, animators...). Even when it comes to personal projects, I always love to develop a turnaround of my character first to make sure that they feel like "themselves" on each angle and that their design is still recognizable from each direction. 

Mary Anning's poses 1

Hi everybody! After a long time on hold I'm finally back to developing my personal project "Anning's fossil depot"! Here you can see some poses of Mary as she goes by her day exploring the coasts of "Blue Lias" in the search of fossils with her faithful companion "Tray" :3 More to come soon!

Mary Anning | Body type + colour exploration

This weekend I've been doing some explorations of different body types and clothing options for Mary. After doing some research of how the fashion style looked like in the XIX century, I started to work directly with brush strokes. It always helps me out in this stage to work directly with shapes and colour masses to understand better the proportions and space that the character will occupy on the screen and how she will interact with her surroundings. For the colour palette I wanted to use some earthy and sea related colours to connect Mary to the cliffs she lived and worked in but also adding a little warmer/brighter detail on the neck ribbon to make the top area of her character catch the attention of the viewer and highlight her passionate personality. My overall goal with her character design is to try to avoid heteronormative stereotypes of how the female body should look like and to explore a wider range of silhouettes. More to come soon! :) 

Anning's fossil depot

Mary Anning (1799-1847) was an English paleontologist and fossil collector whose findings contributed tremendously in our understanding of Prehistoric life. She spent her whole life, since her early childhood, meticulously exploring and climbing over the cliffs of Blue Lias and Charmouth Mudstone, always in the hunt for new fossils and Jurassic treasures. She made huge discoveries such as the first ichthyosar skeleton when she was twelve years old, the first plesiosaur and pterosaur skeletons, and multiples coprolites, belemnites and ammonites. 

As a woman from that century, she was not eligible to join the Geological Society of London and many times she didn't even receive full credit for her scientific contributions. She lived underestimated by her peers and barely gaining enough money to sustain herself and her family from her little shop Anning's fossil depot.

When I discovered Mary's story I immediately felt the need to create a personal project about her life, so I could loudly spread her silenced voice and shed light on the achievements of yet another woman unfairly treated by history. I will be posting some development images during the next weeks, I hope you enjoy this creative process as much as I do! :)