“Over the Garden Wall”, the inspiration behind this!

I had so much fun making up a story and drawing characters I used to to do it all the time before I went into sixth form and I’ve missed it so much! My ideas came from one main place, a show that is very dear to my heart, “Over the Garden Wall”, I watched it all in one go with my sister one night when we were home alone and it was such a great night and I think that made the show even better for me. I decided in the initial phase of designing the character I would do three of designs of each type of character you would encounter in the show, not all of them, just the ones that I enjoyed most. I decided to start with the pumpkins then the animals like cats and rabbits and people.

The design I chose was number two and from here I decided to design her full body off of the scarecrow from “Howls Moving Castle”, a film that I also love very much. I decided I would have this character move like him as well, unable to move arms, change expression, speak or walk, only bounce on a wooden stick. That then got me thinking into what her backstory could be. I decided that the story would take place in the 1800s in an unspecified place, with mostly nameless characters with the only real names used for anyone being “stranger”, “folks”, “traveller”, “outsider”, to create both an adventurous but slightly sinister tone. I decided that this character would have an insomniac and terribly paranoid worm as her companion, sort of like Emily’s maggot friend in “Corpse Bride”. This worm refers to themselves as “Slurm” as it rhymes with worm and they have never had reason for a name, much like our main character whom he addresses as “Patch”, referring to both the state of her clothes and where they had come from. The story would open with the decaying pumpkin patch, Patch is a normal pumpkin at this point and slurm has not been awakened yet. The patch has been left to rot after the landowners disappearance. A group of teenage boys come one day to the decaying patch, speaking of the landowner that had seemingly vanished, the boys take Patch the plain pumpkin home and carve her a face and mount her on a stick, dressing her for Halloween. That is when life stirs inside her and slurm awakens from their sleep from here they decide to set out to solve the mystery of the landowner’s disappearance.