Final Project Proposal

EDITS:

While talking to Dakoda, we discussed a few revisions to my plan that would make my final project stronger. The first is incorporating sound.  Sound effects such as a pencil scratching on paper, and possibly a soft looping track in the background would aid in engaging the user.  It would help to keep them entertained, as it is easy for children at that age to lose intrest.

He said it may be a good idea to incorporate a transparent grain or texture over a white background, instead of notebook paper, to simulate paper.  He also said to make sure my project is very intuitive, while maintaining a simple interface.

Outside of school, I tutor middle school students in math and science. As I have grown to know them, I have discovered that many students at that age have a love for drawing and creation as well. Because of my status as an artist, many of my students want to learn some of the techniques that I have learned through my career. They want to learn the basics of drawing people in a simplistic, visually comprehensible method. Unfortunately, they have found many tutorial books to be largely the same and fail in producing images that are easy to follow. For my final project, I want to create an animated, interactive drawing manual for cartoon characters.

The aesthetic will mirror the look of its target audience’s drawing materials; featuring a notebook paper background and mostly black and white drawings. I want the interface to be easy to use, so each drawing and step-by-step guide will be navigated via point-and-click menus. Many of my students feel that they too often see a guide written that only shows the end result of each step, leaving the methods for arriving at the final drawing left in the dark. To alleviate this, each drawing step will be explained with text and animated illustrations. I think that this will help my tutorial succeed where many fail, by providing actual video documentation of the “work” between each step.

I currently want to have 3 tutorials that slowly increase in difficulty and use elements from the one before; one for drawing faces, another for drawing bodies, and one for drawing both in multiple perspectives.