Cabbage Pot Pre Production | "Cabbage"

The first character of Cabbage Pot is the eponymous 'Cabbage'. I'm not sure where his name came from, but I liked the idea of his family being named after various vegetables, fruits, plants and other objects (his younger sister is called 'Cauliflower' and his mother is 'Aubergine'). He went through a few iterations which saw him as an elderly Gromple, fat, thin, crazy, wise, I wanted him to be a wanderer, always traveling, so I drew him with that in mind.

Here are the two moleskine pages of quick sketches of Cabbage. I knew I wanted him to have a unique look or style, which ended up being his scarf, but his facial structure was integral to his look too. Big eyes and a rounded head were features I wanted to keep because it would display a more vulnerable and youthful side to the non-human character. Something that came out of those original sketches was giving him two very distinct front teeth, again giving him a more youthful, yet crazed look.

First fixed Cabbage concept

I moved onto the first blocked-in design of Cabbage after taking a few elements from the sketches and mixing them together. From this, Cabbage went from pauper and wanderer to magician with the simple addition of a cloak and hat. Before now, none of the Gromples I imagined had possessed magical powers or necessitated the attire for cloaks and robes, yet here it worked with Cabbage and thus magic became another figment of the world. Also, like with prior Gromples, I tried to give each one a motif, a special pattern that would reoccur in their clothes, Cabbage is no different.

Detail of the trim design on Cabbage's hat. 

 So that pattern would adorn the hems of his robes, the trim on the hat and the cuffs of his jacket. I was really pleased with how that original drawing turned out and decided to move onto giving him a bit more detail and including a colour scheme. Cabbage is accented with purple details, and the rest of his costume is really mundane and ordinary. He has a shabby quality, expressed in browns and beiges and off whites; he isn't dressed to impress, but still wears a full ensemble suit under his cloak. When thinking about the costume design I drew inspiration, or was thinking about the kind of lived-in quality of Eddie Redmayne's 'Newt Scamander' in the recent Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them film.

Newt Scamander's Costume in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Tweed textures and nothing refined or distinctive for his time, yet still magical for us an audience. Wrapped around Cabbage's neck is a long knitted scarf with arcane alchemical symbols, some based off real symbols, others just random magical-looking symbols, I wanted it to suggest something magical about Cabbage - perhaps it was an heirloom, or it was knitted by his mother - all to suggest more depth to the character. Then I began a process of simplification - breaking down the above drawing into simple shapes, because at this time I was thinking about how to translate the character into a form easier to animate.

I found some textured paper at my art store and some scraps of paper I had saved from other projects and collaged them into a more animated version from the previous drawing. It gave me a good indication of what all the elements look like in a more basic manner.

Something to note on his hair is how jagged and simple it is; animating lots of individual elements such as hair is made extremely difficult the more of it there is to move, anime characters usually have their hair simplified into jagged clusters (even Yugi from Yu-Gi-Oh!) to avoid the problem of making the workload difficult. It's also an easy way to suggest that Cabbage is a wild character who doesn't really groom himself or care much for the state of his hair.

The next stage of the design process meant translating Cabbage into animated form, but first I had to draw him in a more stylised way which I've chosen to call "Animatification". The image below is an excerpt from the journal featuring a variety of expressions and poses that try to give me an idea of how he'll look from different angles - how his cloak and scarf move during action. All this was very quick and rough as I was really pressed for time. The development phase began right after giving a proposal to the lecturers of what my project wanted to be which was four weeks into an eleven week course, so everything in this early stage was done under pressure from that damn clock!

In theme with his magician outfit, I had given him a wand, but that element will come into play later with another character, 'Esrae the Witch'. Because Gromples don't have traditional human noses, just Voldemort-esque slits for nostrils, working out the various positions of his head was difficult. I used his mouth to suggest more dimensionality than is actually present to get away with it!



That's it for this post on Cabbage's development, there'll be another post tomorrow finishing off his pre-production phase and then it'll be onto Pottle and Esrae!