Ziggy - Character development

In partly basing my story on that of Laika's, I wanted to keep Ziggy relatively similar in terms of breed, So I gathered images of Laika and began to do rough sketches, firstly trying to get used to the shapes at play and secondly to develop a style that I wanted to stick with. Laika was a mongrel and so I've gone for a slightly scruffy almost scrappy design, as I'm trying to make a distinction between Ziggy and characters like Bolt.

I then began to play about with the shapes, trying to imbue Ziggy with some form of innocence, but also a confidence. I think I have achieved that in some of these. Inkeeping with the idea of

I'm keen to explore the idea further, perhaps trying to achieve a stylised realism in the way Ziggy, and his world will be realised, as the animation is basically an alternate timeline story it just makes a lot of sense to keep things grounded in reality. I'm going to carry on experimenting with faces but I feel like I'm going in the right direction with some of these, particularly the final two images (Ziggy in his suit - not the final design - and Ziggy in his undersuit). I'm looking at official images of both Laika and the Apollo missions to maintain the aesthetics I'm aiming for.

Back to work!

Cheers,

Crouch.