Sculpting the character

This is a very interesting character design project I did under the guidance of

Mr. Sekhar Mukherjee, at NID.

The task was to find a real life character, get inspired, and design one of your own with a background story.This project was more than just a character design project. The whole idea of going out in the streets of Ahmedabad and finding a real life character was quite insightful. I was asked to find a butcher, Yeah a Butcher ! I went to Mutton gali, Jamalpur, its one of those streets in Ahmedabad where you will find lot of butcher shops. First two days were not so great, some people were too hesistant to speak anything or answer my questions, a few were rude. I was very lucky to find an old man on my third visit to the place.

His name is Quereshi Mohammed, a very humble man indeed. He looked very interesting to me and stories started popping up in my head. He was very welcoming and answered all my questions and queries with great interests. I told him about myself and then we just went on talking and sharing stories. I used to visit him everyday in the morning around 10:30 and he would tell me about himself, his family, the mutton street, about ahmedabad and lot of other interesting things. I didnt want to disturb his business though :p so when customers used to come I would prefer to stand aside and sketch him chopping off the mutton into pieces. This went on for a week and I had lot of material to be worked on by the end. I made some origami artworks for him and gave him as a token of gratitude, He was too happy to see them, I thanked him for being so co-operative and sharing so many stories.

After the research phase, I started writing a story around him. The story is about Quereshi who has a long beard, longer than anyone else in his village and his six green chicks. I have not uploaded the entire story here but I will upload it soon in the form of a comic book :)

Next was to develop the character. I took inspiration from his physical features and added my own elements to it. When I had the final character design ready I moved ahead to make a Clay Model of it.

Here is the entire documentation of the whole project. This project is one of my favourite projects I have worked on so far and I hope you will like it too.

Enjoy ;)