🐑 Herding sheep and checking off another 2 pages!

This week we learn about Max's job.

Back when I started designing the characters for Every Dog Needs a Job, I had to decide if I was going to keep the canine cast of characters as normal four-legged friends or make them anthropomorphic.

I tried several sketches of the main characters as two-legged dogs. But none of them felt quite right for what I envisioned for the book. But in my initial play I created a few funny ideas of the dogs doing more human-like activities or expressing more human-like emotions. All of these made me smile. That’s a good sign I was on the right path!

Some initial character exploration considered making the main characters walk on two legs and act more human.

Final designs incorporated some fun human characteristics, but also allows them to walk on four legs when necessary.

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Incorporating some silly

Since my main characters can do non-dog-like things I wanted to add in some moments of humor throughout the story. In the first spread, I added Gus catching some rays while floating on a tube in the fountain. His shades and drink, not to mention the tube itself, make for a fun little moment that I think kiddos will enjoy.

For this spread, I added a subtle joke that made me laugh and subverted expectations a little. While our character we’re learning about, Max, is a sheep herding dog, the way he’s shown in the illustration is unexpected:

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The final illustration for pages 7 and 8

I really like how this final art turned out! I loved drawing all the sheep and, I think, adding the sunrise created some visual interest (that was also fun to draw.) Here’s the entire process.

Initial rough sketch:

Detailed “final” sketch:

Color rough exploration:

Final illustration:

Another week down feels good! I'd love to hear what you think about this one in the comments. Till next week! 🍻

All images and text copyrighted by Corey George unless otherwise noted. Images may not be used without prior permission.

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