CG Artist Toolkit- Character Design: 'Prop design and Anthropomorphism'

Our first exercise was a tricky one.

With the object we brought in (myself, a palm tree photo holder), and a photo- at random- of an existing character, we were asked to re-design it to integrate into that characters universe.
That meant both considering the visual style of the character, (the 'look'), and the context of the object itself.

In my case the Hulk had either 1- handmade a gift for a romantic interest, or 2- had a go at home decor:

Either way I don't suppose she was impressed. Or the car's owner. Or the police for that matter. 

I'd imagine the Hulk would struggle using a needle or anything too intricate, so I drew from the fact the object was metal, and the chaos he often leaves behind in his wake, to use bits and pieces of rubble (from his more stressful evenings), bent and torn metal... and parts of existing vehicles and manmade structures to make something- faintly resembling- the holder.
Using a car side mirror, he'd impale a smaller metal column into the glass, and attach the 'leaves' by shoving a massive chunk of metal through the middle- where they meet).

More sketches to see how he could've possibly made a picture holder using plane parts.

 The second exercise we were each given a room (Bedroom i.e.), and had to see faces and make characters out of all objects you could find there.

 Starting with the mirror, comb and brush- since they were a set, I made them the groups elderly siblings. The second to last oldest group of objects in the room.
The oldest is the carpet that I hadn't got round to designing. However I imagine being stepped on all day would give it a cynical nature on life.
The chair is quite laid back, to reflect it's purpose.
However, I imagine the bed to be quite paranoid ironically. While it's owner sleeps soundly, the bed itself looks out for dangers- monsters under the bed, and all the unlikely scenarios that could wreck havoc on it's owners 8 hour slumber.

The wooden handled lamp- as inspired by my own at home- I'd imagined to have  a down to earth manner- to reflect it being hand made. Or eccentric, since it looks like it could have come from abroad. That meant not showing any obvious features, since it was quite mysterious.

However, I ended up drawing an additional part on the top, with eyes and such, so that changed the deign considerably.
An alternative would be this little fellow:

A shy lamp, which ironically brings attention to itself by shining light into the faces of all other objects whenever it tries to turn away bashfully.

Finally is the 3 part mirror, which I'd made to represent 3 different looks- mad/out there... uncaring, and very orchestrated/hour long preparation to look nothing like yourself, and the third one.... ended up being like the second. So that could have been done differently...
However, it was good fun, and good at having us think about the correlation between shape, context and purpose in visual character design.