one second a week squirrel

This week has been national red squirrel awareness week so I decided to use this as my inspiration for my work. I started this by drawing some sketches of how the squirrel might appear, it was also suggested to me that I could have a grey and red squirrel boxing so symbolise how the grey has taken over the red squirrel in its habitat. I sketched this idea out but I was not happy with the way it looked because it seemed to me to be quite a childlike visualisation. As we have been studying work cycles with Mario I decided to also incorporate this into my work too, the project with Mario required us to create a walk cycle for a quadruped so for this I used the squirrel and then used this animation for both projects. I used a squirrel running rather than walking as a squirrels is more typically seen running or skipping and rareley walking. First I visualised the movement and watched videos of squirrels walking and running to refresh my mind and stimulate my imagination of this sequence. I also looked at Muybridge's studies of animals and people which helped to determine how many frames to have in one of the squirrels leaps. After I had done this I began to draw beginning with a hunched position ready to spring forward, I then opened up the body and the squirrel extended creating momentum and leaving the floor, holding its position flat in the air and then coming down in an arc with its front feet making contact first, the back legs follow this motion and land in front of the front feet so it is then hunched and ready to spring again. In this way the squirrel is always readying itself for the next jump and can also be played on a loop. I drew the rough sketches for this in my walk cycles book and then traced these and neatened them up using fine liner to put into my one second a week sketch book. For the walk cycle I had the squirrel move across the page however when I neatened it I kept it in the same spot on the page so it appears to be running on the spot or the camera is panning with it.