Character Design (and Picture Book Studies)
Unconventional Campaign World-Building
These characters just started as just something silly to draw in my sketchbook, but they became my creative release through a time when I struggled with artistic inspiration. When I suddenly had more free time to devote to art projects, I decided to spend some of it developing this party into a picture book. The project comes in bits and pieces, particularly because I got drawn into the research and preparation stages and have been working on a lot of other ancillary ideas while I'm still figuring out what I'm doing instead of starting right away with the project I really care about getting right. However, I do have the characters, the shape of the story, and many pages of world building and some of the other characters who inhabit their world (which started my newest sketchbook off in the best possible way).
Fingertips World-Building
These are all original characters that I am developing for a story I am writing - or thinking about writing. Honestly, I'm a lot better with world-building then plot and execution and I have more experience with drawing, so a lot of my energy thus far has been directed towards what you see below. The impetus for the story was inspired a conversation I had with my father - he was a huge fan of They Might Be Giants and once told me that he wanted to write a book based off their song "Fingertips" - a series of mini-songs which each center around a word or phrase. Each of these characters have been inspired by various other They Might Be Giants songs and they are at different stages of development - some characters already have a full-blown back story (not included here) and some have already been written into short stories. Below you will see a mix of some which only a have basic sketches or outlines, some who went through several phases of development, and some I was happy with the first sketch.
"Shining Star" Redesign
As part of the process of research and development of picture books, I decided to begin with applying the principles I have been learning to a pre-existing story - which I happen to have because one of the group projects I did for the Technology Student Association competition I participated in during high school was a picture book about the life cycle of a star. I'm not going to post many of the originals here since much of the art, including Juniper's original design, is not my own (there were four illustrators and one writer). However, I have included the original character sketches I submitted. I have modified the text a bit to hone the style some, though that will not be prominently featured here at present as this is intended to feature the illustrative portion. I am also including a couple of the mock spreads I made (which have intentionally sloppy illustrations for the purposes of blocking and having something existent to work with), which feature the army of stuffed animals I think would add to the dynamism of the completed story - as you can see, I had initially proposed that the main character have a companion in her adventures, though I decided upon reflection that it would be more fun to include a variety.
Miscellaneous Character Designs
As part of the process of research and development of picture books, I have been practicing with some character drawing prompts (from Beverly Johnson's book "Draw Great Characters and Creatures") - those should all be labeled with the exercise number and explanation. There are also quite a few other illustrations of original characters I have done over the years mixed in - most of whom have stories attached - as well as some of my own original takes on characters from different media (those will also be indicated).
