Character Work

I realised that I did that thing again where i just let myself use the first design i come up with. In my reflection of Cop i commented that a lot of the art work would have turned out better if I'd just redrawn the things a couple times over before deciding on the final form. So I'm giving myself the kick up the butt and I'm not doing that in this project, because if i just settle on the first drawing it's like I'm not developing but just trying to finish the project. 

SO... here is my drawing and redrawing

With this one I was trying out different body shapes to see if i really had got the best one i could do. The one in the bottom right corner looks remarkably like a poo on legs. This experimentation lead to the decision to have multiple characters. I liked too many of the designs to watch just one and their bodies are not particularly taxing to draw  so it wouldn't be too hard to have multiple main characters. I normally avoid this because of the extra tie it adds to the drawing process. 

I picked the large one because I imagined it would be a useful character for all the heavy lifting since they are such small creatures. I chose the smaller one just because it was the main rival to my original design when i was going to just pick one. And then i chose the smallest one because it just looks adorable and I can have loads of them.

This is them all together, I got to assign them all the names that were contending for the soul spot when there was just one character. So the original one is 'Sprig' the smaller one is 'Root', the largest is 'Soil' and the small ones are called 'Sprouts' which weren't part of my original name list but it just fitted them so well.

Next I was redesigning the hat. It was one thing in the original design that just didn't quite sit well with me. The design was awkward, I thought i wanted something nature based, so like they'd made it them selves but it needed reworking. I started with more nature based designs but they kept looking weird on top of the head. I chatted to Rosie about it and she was saying she liked the ones that had stuff just growing out of their heads, because then across the different sizes of character there could be different amounts of foliage. I tried it out with the bottom two 2nd from the left but I don't like how it turned out. And i liked the idea of it being a hat so that it can be removed and changed throughout the story. I did a bottle cap one and I suddenly realised that my story is based around recycling so surely their hats should be made out of rubbish. So the final favourites of re purposed hats were: Bottle cap, Bottle cap with leaf in, Broken spoon, McDonald's ketchup holder. 

Altogether, I had a little play with poses but that is something that I will have on another sheet. And one for each character. I'm not giving up on this redrawing thing, it's reaping some pretty good rewards. 

I did some expressions as well so that i had a little library of emotion to use during the book. I'm going to borrow that book that is just photos of peoples faces again because it's great reference and has like every expression you could ever want. I don't think I have enough here but I've got some basic variations