I See Faces brief - first day thoughts and experiments

I'm feeling hopeful about this brief as it focuses heavily on character which is something I always enjoy, although I can improve massively. This brief will be a great opportunity to change how I think about character and a chance for me to get away from established ways of drawing that I think I've been getting stuck in.

 This is the first page of ideas I had responding to the word "hopeful". The owl character was the first thing I thought of because of a relation to my COP essay and the themes I've been discussing in that. In the graphic novel Watchmen which I have analysed for my essay there is an owl themed character, Nite-Owl, who works as a representation for humanity and is the only truly hopeful and non-cynical character in the narrative. Because of this I just automatically associated the word hopeful with the imagery of an owl.
Overall I began to focus on round soft shapes and large eyes because they suggest openness and optimism, but after going over it with Matt, these elements are more restrictive than anything else to my ideas as I think I have started to become stuck in the process of using the same aesthetics across multiple drawings and I really want to try something new. I also think that I need to get more confidence in my ability because we also discussed that without noticing I often go over and repeat lines as if I aren't convinced that they look very good. these are all issues I'm happy to have had discussed and feel that I can move forward from this point.
 This page is much more experimental and was borne from the idea of taking the basic shapes of a large circle and two smaller circles and warping them into new shapes to better express a greater range of ideas. I think these characters immediately have more personality than my initial ideas that are probably generic and pretty safe/boring.
      
These pages continue the experimentation as I was trying still to focus on a different use of shape and arrangement, while trying to come up with some ideas that I think would be quite funny as a mini-narrative, as narratives are where characters thrive. Seeing as my hair is probably the most prominent bit about myself, I want to explore a character that appears to be defined by it, and then loses it in some comical way. Talking about it with some people in class one idea was that the whole hair gained a consciousness and ran away, or that it just burned off during sleep. I like this idea as I think it could work well as a sequence, even though I haven't actually started thinking about the final design of any of the GIFs. I have also started to repeat drawings more, as its a good way of gauging what elements do and don't work and how one change can have large impacts on the overall feel of the image.
 This final page is the beginnings of my initial ideas in response to stress and bad luck, mainly because it was my personal bad luck to be at work this weekend for the horrible in depth bi-annual stocktake. We had to do five recounts of hundreds of items that I swear do not exist, and then I had no dinner because the girl who ran out to get everyone's forgot me because I was running around looking for polo shirts that had actually been sold two days prior, and then the bus I was on this morning had the back window caved in and I had to speed walk the rest of the way to get in on time. The combination of all this sh** at least will work well as great inspiration for exploring characters in response to the feeling of being stressed and/or pissed off.