Characters

Character Development

Francesca Hannah Veal Development, Experiments, Project Four , , ,

Before I continued with the rest of my book I completed the designs of my bee characters, using the sketches I uploaded and Photoshop. I have only worked on the one front pose for each character, and I want to experiment on using just this pose to start with, and then adding in other poses later on.

 

I started by removing the sketch and placing into a new blank canvas, removing the white and duplicating the sketch to make the other half of the bee.Character Development

Secondly I went over the outline with a small black paintbrush to make the outline of the bees more visible. And then began colouring the characters in.

Character Development 2

I planned to use my sketch of the female bee for the character “Sally” however once edited the character looked more appropriate for the “Mother” character and I was short of a “Sally” and “Holly” bee. Using segments of different characters and editing them together, I was able to create the two new characters and distinguishing them somehow from the rest.

Character Development 3

My focus in creating these characters was to make an obvious difference in look between each of them, so it would be easy for my younger target audience to distinguish between the characters and be able to follow the storyline.

First Draft Sketches

Francesca Hannah Veal Development, Experiments, Project Four , , , , , ,

With a general idea for the theme, storyline and synopsis of my picture book, I began some sketches of characters and objects.

As I am not the best artist in the world, I thought logically about my drawings and decided to draw half of each character, so both sides would look identical. I may later decide to draw some more characters and/or versions of my characters so they can appear more than one in a different pose, but for now I want to experiment with some of these.

Now scanned in, I can start adding colour using the paint brush tools in Photoshop, and experiment watching YouTube tutorials on how to make these characters look more realistic.

Research into Bee Characters

Francesca Hannah Veal Project Four, Research , ,

I searched the internet for images of bee’s in books, films and just examples of animated/cartoon bees.

The Bee Movie

Cartoon Bees

Winnie the Pooh Bees

 

From my research I have found that the drawing/creation of a bee character needs to be simplistic and not over complicated – which is to my benefit as I am not the best at drawing. It needs to be essential that I have a black outline, even if it is very thin, around my bee’s to make the yellow body and white wings stand out against my white background.

I need to experiment drawing out my characters, but I think I will be scanning these into Photoshop and creating them using the brush tools and paint tools. I also need to start thinking about my backgrounds, and how I want the front cover to look.