An Animated Skeleton-Jessie Stauber

Doing research for this project was at first intimidating. My first though was "This is a somewhat odd project..how on earth am I going to be able to find reference material for this?" When I started looking into it, I was surprised at how many people had done projects like what we were being asked to do. For many years, the human race has been fascinated by what is underneath our skin. Before science was in it's earliest years of discover, people speculated at what they thought might lie beneath the surface. In ancient Greece, statues were carved out of marble, cast out of bronze to replicate the ideal human form. The ancient Romans moved towards a more realistic representation, adding realistic details to the form they were replicating. When the Renaissance came around, masters like Leonardo DaVinci, Michelangelo, and hundreds more began to explore the human form in all its intricacies. My point being, throughout the ages, scientists and artists alike have been fascinated with what lies under the surface. Today is no different. And with such vivid characters we have brought to life from our mind's eye, why wouldn't we apply the same application of curiosity to them?

I began by looking up the cartoons I had grown up with as well as recently become acquainted with. It was hard to decide at first as I didn't have a particular passion for any one of their bodily designs. Which one could give me enough of a mix of human and animal to provide an interesting study? I finally settled on Judy Hopps from Disney's most recent film, Zootopia. A popular animation, this film anthropomorphizes animals, allowing them to speak and look fairly similar to humans. I liked the idea of using elements of both human and animal together. Despite the fact that humans and animals are shaped differently, drawing parallels between the structures is easy. As it turns out, joints and limbs tend to work similarly in most bodies.

One of the hardest parts of drawing this character was her skull. How could I combine the skull of a rabbit and a human well enough to look realistic? I ended up taking the skill of a human, flattening it a bit and making the front teeth quite a bit larger. It was actually quite satisfying, aligning the external and internal structures next to each other. I could almost see the way the character moved in the way that I designed her bones.

Overall, I think this project was an interesting one although I did not initially expect it to be so. I enjoy dealing mostly in the metaphysical and being able to describe the mind through the physical world. This at first seemed to me a purely physical study, surface level some could say. When I looked deeper, however, I realized that I was actually dabbling in thousands of years worth of curiosity in how we ourselves are built. We've always been fascinated with internal structures, of living things especially, and even our latest expressions show this. I think of all of our latest skeletal characters, representations. As it turns out, the skeleton doesn't actually always equate to death. Many times, in fact, it can mean the exact opposite.

https://www.boredpanda.com/cartoon-character-skeletons-michael-paulus/

http://michaelpaulus.com/section/59023-Character-Study.html

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http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/skeletons-famous-cartoon-characters/

http://designtaxi.com/news/367688/Creepy-Illustrations-Show-The-Skeletons-Of-Popular-Cartoon-Characters/

http://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/the-most-notorious-skeletons-of-all-time