This post includes a compilation of various conceptual design projects Céu has completed throughout his career. These include his own characters, originally published in comics and later adapted for hand-drawn animation, and commissioned works, such as the Little Monsters for a collection of bubblegum cards.
Comments from Céu:
I like form. Philosophically speaking, everybody does.
But I like how you can use lines on a flat surface and trick your eyes into tricking your brain into thinking what you’re seeing is three-dimensional and exists in space. Better yet, I like drawing things that, at the same time, don’t pretend to be real, but are believable enough for you to accept that they are. Simultaneously stylized and full of form. Paradoxically abstract and solid. That’s what makes animation feel like a dream: the contradiction is that it feels real and unreal at the same time.
So, with all this power of lines, I truly reject the concept of calling hand-drawn animation 2D. A drawing can be 2D if you want to make it that way, but not all drawings are 2D. It shows a certain ignorance to call any drawing 2D, especially if you’re an artist and have some education.
Coming back to the paradoxical and dreamlike subject, this is the reason why I prefer watching stop motion or hand-drawn animation films rather than CG-3D, especially when CG-3D animation is intended to be very realistic: – The dream experience refreshes my mind and plays better with my imagination.
In this post, you can see various hand-drawn conceptual designs. Probably the biggest influence on my style was traditional American animation, mixed with Belgian Francophone comics (Bande Dessiné).
Sometimes I like to use that Brussels style, the Ligne Claire. A thin, regular line that outlines the masses you draw. As Hergé used to say: “Draw behind your character.”
Other times, I like the Atom style, à la Marcinelle, paying more attention to the line itself and developing the dynamics of the drawing initially from the line and the movement of the wrist that created it and, spreading it throughout the composition, organizing the negative forms of its image.
The monster collection you see in this post is just a small fraction of what I created years ago for a card and gum collection, The Ploc Monsters. I have over three hundred of them in my drawers, all different.
Kurupyra (a wild indigenous Brazilian dwarf with backward-facing feet), riding a Black Boar, was NUPA’s mascot. In one of its variations, which I published here, there are also a multitude of different characters, none of them mine, which I draw in my own style. This is because Kurupyra was used to introduce the different guests, or topics, we had in our animation classes and lectures.
Some of the MãmMãmBuges characters can be seen animated in the video clip Collages 83 14.
The Zu Kinkaju characters have also some of their Comics pages in this other link.
Céu D´Ellia
