Creating characters
It's time to start drawing!
It’s week 3 of my new picture book journey. We’ve tweaked the story manuscript enough - for now. So it’s time to start envisioning what my main characters are going to look like. The story centers on a Golden Doodle named Gus. He’s actually inspired by our real dog…surprisingly also named Gus!
Throughout the book Gus is going to learn about some of the jobs that dogs can do from his three new friends Ranger, Cassie, and Max.
My goal was to draw recognizable dog breeds, but not get overly detailed. I wanted to find the balance in capturing enough of the traits that make them identifiable, while stylizing them enough where they were fun to draw, with lots of personality and emotions that children could connect with.
I looked at lots of reference photos like these cute pups:
While it took several days of refining and reworking - and even switching to different breeds several times (some dogs are really hard to draw!), I’ve landed on some stylized doggos that I’m pretty happy with. I had to determine if my pooches would stay on their four legs or be more anthropomorphic, walking around and acting more human like. I landed on kind of a combo! They’re all four-legged, but may have some human-like mannerisms.
Ready to meet the gang?
I created some character sheets for each of the four main dogs and did some explorations of how they might be colored. It was important to make sure they were all cohesive and each color palette fit with the others. I’ll use these as references to make sure they stay consistent throughout the book illustration process.
That consistency is a real challenge! Just drawing the same character on a different day can create different results. You can see lots of little differences between all the characters in the images above - something I’ll have to tighten up a little bit.
Overall, I feel pretty good with each character now. I may change the way I shade them though. You can see differences and some experimentation with different textures if you look at the character sheets. I have a habit of being indecisive at times and will redraw things over and over because I’m not happy with the results. But, that’s one of the reasons for doing this, and sharing it with you. I have to make decisions and not overthink it!
Thanks for reading along. See you next week as I thumbnail (rough sketch) out the entire book.
Feel like supporting me?
I would love that! Everything I post here will be free content - from sketchy doodles to finished pages. I want to draw cute stuff and I want people to enjoy it. The best ways to support me are by leaving comments and sharing my posts with other people who you think might like to see a children's book come to life.
But if you would like to support me financially, that would be amazing! Content-wise, I won’t have different or additional content for paid supporters. You’ll just have my heartfelt gratitude and thanks.
Great illustrations!
I love them!!