Character Design

These are some ideas for character designs I had started during my authorship project last year. I really like the technique I used of collaging and then adding details digitally, so this is a technique I would definitely try out again.

I decided to make my character female, although I didn't want to make her overly "girly" as I wanted to aim my book at both boys and girls. I also didn't want to stereotype girls as all being princess-y and dressed all in pink, as I think that most young girls aren't really like that, and there is already a huge amount of books on the market that already cater to this. I also think that this gives out a more positive message to children, as I think there is already a huge pressure on young girls to be interested in things that are typically girly and pink - like barbie, ponies, princesses and fairies - while boys are encouraged to like football, robots and dinosaurs. I think that children should be allowed and encouraged to pursue their own interests regardless of the traditional gender roles, and I want my book to reflect this.

I decided to dress her in dungarees, as it is a quite neutral form of clothing, but made them slightly feminine from the pattern I used. I also made her coat for the outside scenes purple, as this helps show that she is a girl without being pink. 

Whilst starting to design my character I also wanted to think about if and how fancy dress might be incorporated into my book, so I decided to draw her in different outfits

Although I liked the idea of fancy dress, I wanted to keep consistency throughout my book to make it clear to young children that it was the same character throughout the story, and so I chose an outfit for indoors and an outfit for outdoors

What do children want to be?

The first thing I needed to do was to try and think of a list of things children want to be. Using a mix of internet research on forums, and asking people I know what they wanted to be when they were young, and/or what their children have said they want to be, I wrote down all the ideas I thought would be effective.

Although there were a lot of job aspirations - such as becoming an astronaut, a ballerina, a firefighter, a superhero... - there were also a large amount of impossible things such as animals and objects. 
I thought that the stranger and impossible things were far more interesting than the realistic ones, and I thought that the career choice ideas were more of an adult view on how children think than thinking at children's level, so I decided to use the stranger ideas.

I used the start of a sentence: "When I grow up, I want to be..." to come up with some sketches and ideas of how to portray children becoming the things they want to be.

I decided to focus on a few of the stronger ideas:

• a cat
• a flower
• a tree/a leaf
• a butterfly
• a balloon
• a giant
• a star
• the moon
• a mouse

My next job was trying to write a narrative around these ideas. My initial sketches had all been of different children with a before and an after image, but I couldn't think of a way of using lots of children and still having a strong narrative and keeping the book consistent.

I decided to focus on one child imagining all the things she wants to be in an average day. This way I could have a clear beginning and an end to my story - her waking up at the start, and going back to bed at the end - and make a story around the things she would do during the day.

Change of Idea

I love drawing animals so I started my project thinking that I would write a narrative around the anthropomorphic characters I had been drawing, however I found that my original idea of creating a book about things children want to be when they grow up was a much stronger and more imaginative plot. 

I started out looking at the strange things children say they want to become - such as a leaf or a cat - and then went on to look at career aspirations of children. I did find, however, that children wanting to be an astronaut or a train driver has not only been done plenty of times before, but was also a very grown up way of thinking about this that wouldn't really connect with the children. In order to get onto children's level with this subject I had to go back and look at the strange things I've heard children actually say they want to be - the leaf was based on my younger sister coming home from playgroup and deciding that was what she was going to be when she grew up, and my nephew quite often decides he wants to be a bear, a dinosaur, a tiger...

I also tried thinking back to some of the things I wanted to be when I was younger. I can remember watching butterflies landing on a floral patterned garden chair in my neighbour's garden and deciding to wear flowery clothes in the garden in the hope that one would land on me, so I decided this would be a useful idea for my book.

Collaging animals

Seeing as collage was such a big part of my previous projects, I decided to try it out on some of my sketches from this project

Using one of my sketches, I collaged bits of found paper. I wanted the layers to be obvious to give it some depth, which is why I cut each piece individually (eg, head, body, arms..) and overlapped them a little rather than cutting out the silhouette and just adding the details - although this did take longer and meant I needed a high contrast taking a photo of my work as the layers didn’t show up very well at first

After trying out collage with bits of paper I had found, I decided I wanted try using my own textures and colours. This is a collage using a red-brown acrylic paint on off white paper, put on with a wide paintbrush.
To carry this on, I am going to experiment with different materials (watercolour paint, ink, texture rubbings, relief prints..) applied with different tools (a paint roller, sticks, textured wallpaper, a sponge…) and see which ones work best.

Scenery and Details

Generally in my work, I spend the majority of my time and ideas on the characters and main focus, with the background and scenery being an afterthought. Because of this, i decided to start looking at scenery early on in my project, by breaking it down into individual sections.

A page from my sketchbook with notes on the various natural layers in woodland areas

 Since a great deal of the animals I have drawn so far have been woodland creatures, I decided this was a good place to start my research. First I looked at how woodland can be split into different layers - tall tree canopy, shrub layer, field layer and ground layer - and then I looked which plants fit into which layer.

I had been drawing a lot of hedgehogs, and so I decided to research their diet, habitat and lifestyle too. Hedgehogs eat mainly insects, and I decided to start painting some insects you would find in a woodland habitat

This research obviously still has a way to go, but it should be incredibly useful in helping me plan out an accurate and well thought out scene in which to put my characters.
I also need to look into other settings - eg. jungle, icy, underwater... - in which the other animals I have been drawing could live