I had been struggling for inspiration and where to go with my next project, and decided to develop on something I have been putting off – character designing. Although I don’t intend to go down (at this point), a narrative style illustration, I do want to develop and work on a character for my theme of childhood, as a child is important in that. I was looking through Pinterest and books in the library and came across a few sources of inspiration for different reasons. As a child, I had paper dolls that after a few playtimes were ripped and torn, and so I noted that it would have to be printed on thicker paper. I decided to be inspired by the paper dolls rather than creating one due to my perfectionist tendencies working against me, however I did want to use the same face and hair for all. I looked at Julia Donaldson and Rebecca Cobb’s new book “The Paper Dolls”, as the dolls were their own character, rather than an accessory, which I thought would be interesting for a sequential illustration. On Pinterest, I liked the paper characters hanging from a string by Joana Rosa Bragança https://www.instagram.com/joanarosab/?hl=en and paper doll marionettes by Carol W on https://www.flickr.com/photos/machecolle/albums/72157622685859395. I thought I would create a small bunting with the characters, rather than dangling them as I was worried it would look menacing. I didn’t have any circular pins to create the marionette with moving limbs but I enjoyed the idea and the versatility of it.
Below are some of my earlier designs of what eventually formed this character, as initially partly-developed for my gouache illustration. These final illustrations are a lot closer to what I had in my head, although it was important in my process to have already created part of a character for my gouache painting as I knew what I wanted to change and improve.
I started to make a design inspired by photos of me as a child, as I had been looking at photos of some of my favourite outfits and wanted to include them as a subtle way of creating a personal connection to the character that would not disrupt other’s viewings of it, and allow them to make their own connections. I knew that I wanted to create a character with slightly wild curly hair, as I wanted there to be a slight reflection of me as a child. I used the face that I had started to create for my gouache illustrations, as it was simple enough for it to give the childish impression that I was looking for. I created a face and hair template, and drew a swimsuit and rough t-shirt + trousers template so I could create a paper-doll like template to work with.
I wanted to use a pressure controlled digital pen to create alternative width lines so that my illustrations didn’t feel flat, and had some character in their line. Although my first set of six designs was inspired by childhood outfits, I wanted to work on a more sequential illustration for my next set. I started thinking about childhood dress up in outfits of adult jobs, as well as a future project of working with alphabet illustrations, and ended up deciding to do a set of six characters with six different jobs in the letters ABCDEF. I settled on astronaut, builder, chef, doctor, engineer and firefighter. I wanted it still to be clear that it was the same character, however I refined the hair and face slightly as I had found that the hair on the first picture was a little thicker pressure than I intended. This time I also wanted to add accessories to the hair and head such as an astronaut helmet, chefs hat and two helmets.
As I had created these digitally, I was able to add colour easily, however some of my pressure controlled lines were a little thinner, and so the colour drop had to be done manually. I wanted to use the new colour palette that I had created as there were six colours and two sets of six characters. I wanted to use the same colour in each character to create a clear separation that was less clear in the line art. I used the same order for both sets, and noticed an accidental parallel in some of them. The curves on the princess dress echoed the astronaut suit, and the yellow bands on the star child and builder had similar white spaces, as well as the dark green dungarees echoing the shape left of the doctors coat and trousers.
Lastly, I wanted to create some little poster designs for a quick repeat experiment, and created three. I did one with the childhood outfits character and another with the childhood alphabet jobs, as well as one that combined both designs. Overall, I’m happy with my character designs, and although it was a lot of work I like the final product, and it was good to learn how to create a character that had personality and that I was proud of.
