#140characters140days - Half Way!

140 Days!?!?!

I'm so foolish. My goal of drawing 140 different characters in 140 days is a way bigger task than I planned, and I'm constantly falling behind. But will I give up? NO!

...well... probably not.

#140characters140days Weeks 1 & 2

Weeks 1 and 2 of my mission to create 140 character designs in 140 days has gone okay, though I'm already falling behind due to a big deadline coming up.

I want to blog more about my discoveries during this process but that will have to wait until next month when I have more time. In the meantime here's what I've done so far,

My First Picture Book Dummy Part 6 - Finals

Part 1 - Concept And Inspiration
Part 2 - Writing
Part 3 - Thumbnails
Part 4 - Character Design 
Part 5 - Roughs 
Part 6 - Finals

I've lapsed in my writing of this series for a few weeks because I was on holiday and was trying to work as little as possible, but I suppose that's it's own blog post.

I mentioned in a previous post in this series that I still have a few roughs to finish before my book dummy will be complete. This hasn't stopped me from moving ahead to finish some of the final spreads. I was getting stuck on the last roughs and it was frustrating so I followed a piece of advice I got long ago that I often turn to. The advice is this, "Do what you know first, the rest will work itself out after". This is usually applied within one drawing, but can also be used in a bigger project.

In the case of my book dummy it's my hope that seeing a few finished pieces will help inspire me to push through those last problematic roughs, and help to inform them as well.

Textures My Kid Made

My two year old daughter loves crafting, and when she's crafting she loves to cover the paper corner to corner. I can always tell at daycare which craft/painting/drawing is hers because there isn't a speck of space left. Unless you count the tears in the paper from paint overload.

So when she made these 3 crafts with my wife I saw them and thought that they would make potentially neat photoshop textures. Don't ask me how they were made, my wife is the master of the strange painterly concoctions.

Please download them, there's JPG's below or click here to download the TIFF's, and let me know the results!

My First Picture Book Dummy Part 5 - Roughs

Part 1 - Concept And Inspiration
Part 2 - Writing
Part 3 - Thumbnails
Part 4 - Character Design 
Part 5 - Roughs 
Part 6 - Finals

After all the prep work was done for my picture book dummy came the best part, the drawing!

In my post on creating thumbnails for my picture book dummy I wrote about how I moved on from tiny thumbnail drawings to large ones which were really more like preliminary roughs as you can see below.

Preliminary Roughs

I used to do all my rough sketches by hand in a sketchbook and it involved sooooo much erasing and overdrawing. It seems some people just know where to put every line, but that's definitely not me. I'm the trial and error type.

My First Picture Book Dummy Part 4 - Character Design

Part 1 - Concept And Inspiration
Part 2 - Writing
Part 3 - Thumbnails
Part 4 - Character Design 
Part 5 - Roughs 
Part 6 - Finals

In preparation for this post I came to the realization that I did a terrible job at designing the characters for my picture book dummy, in the sense that I didn't.
I went back into my folders looking for my rough designs that I assumed that I had done while writing and thumbnailing and came up empty except for this:

My only character design sketches

That's it.

One pass of just the main character.

Impressive isn't it?

The #140characters140days Initiative

My character design is weak. There, I've admitted it. Now... how's yours? Not bad? Could be better? Well let's do something about it.

Starting October 1, 2013 I'll be creating one character design per day for 140 days and tweeting them each day using the hashtag #140characters140days. I'll also post a weekly roundup of my designs right here on my blog.

I'll also be scouring the intertubes for great character design resources and tweeting/posting those as well so we can all grow in our craft.

Please feel free to join in any time and make sure to use the hastag #140characters140days.

My First Picture Book Dummy Part 3 - Thumbnails

Part 1 - Concept And Inspiration
Part 2 - Writing
Part 3 - Thumbnails
Part 4 - Character Design 
Part 5 - Roughs 
Part 6 - Finals

In parts 1 and 2 of this series I wrote about my inspiration, concept, and writing process for my first picture book dummy that I'm putting together about a little girl with a pet tiger.

Using a spreadsheet for my writing was quite useful when I reached the thumbnailing stage. I already had it all laid out and separated according to each spread. Of course thumbnailing is it's own process and tweaks were made along the way.

Very rough thumbnails

The above thumbs are incredibly rough and likely readable only to me. They were done really quick to get down the compositions that I had in mind for each spread. Things were moved around several times at this point to get the visual pacing right. I did all these digitally within photoshop, which is how I typically sketch. I never nail things on the first pass and so I love the flexibility of working digitally.

My First Picture Book Dummy, Part 2 -Writing

Part 1 - Concept And Inspiration
Part 2 - Writing
Part 3 - Thumbnails
Part 4 - Character Design 
Part 5 - Roughs 
Part 6 - Finals

Last week in part one I wrote about how and why I decided to create my first picture book dummy. So then came the toughest part, the writing.

I knew that since I'm much less confident in my writing than I am in my drawing that it would be best to err on the side of simplicity. One day I might take a shot at wonderful rhyming prose like Julia Donaldson (The Gruffalo) but it will take a lot of work before I have the chops for that. At this point though, I still only had the idea of a girl having a pet tiger. Where to go from there?

My First Picture Book Dummy, Part 1 - Concept & Inspiration

Part 1 - Concept And Inspiration
Part 2 - Writing
Part 3 - Thumbnails
Part 4 - Character Design 
Part 5 - Roughs 
Part 6 - Finals

Although it feels like I'm just getting started in my illustration career (will it ever stop feeling that way?) I've actually been doing it for quite a while now, over 7 years in fact. I've had many fun projects along the way but it has begun to feel like I was over due in focusing in on my big goal of becoming a published picture book illustrator.

Inspirations for my picture book dummy

Alas, the only offers I've received for children's book illustration have been from self publishers. While I'm quite flattered by the offers, I also want to be paid for my work since that's the professional part in professional illustrator. So I felt it was a good time to start creating my own picture book. A couple things helped me come to this conclusion.

More Trucks for iOS

Last year I was fortunate to work with the wonderful developers over at Duck Duck Moose to help create the graphics for their iOS app Trucks. This year I'm happy to announce that I was able to team up with them once again to help produce the sequel, More Trucks.

Dandelions for Turtle Magazine

Before this piece I've never drawn a character with such curly hair!

The untamable locks were in part inspired by by 2 year old daughter who's own curly hair is getting bigger and more unruly every day. She always wants me to draw her and so I decided that it was time to man up and figure out how to render crazy long curly hair in my regular style. It took a few attempts to get it right but I'm very pleased with the result. Since it was so fun and I was so pleased with the result all of my characters now have curly hair!

This piece is featured on the back cover of this month's Turtle Magazine. Thanks for the super fun assignment Turtle!

New Pieces for U.S. Kids

I've been incredibly remiss at updating my website and blog due to an incredibly heavy workload in the past several months. With the new year ringing in my one resolution is to redouble my self promotion and marketing efforts to keep moving in the right direction.

My website has been updated with a handful of new work, check it out here.

And to continue the trend, here are a couple of recent illustrations created for U.S. Kids magazines. My most recent piece for them has just been completed and will be out in March. It's one of my favourite pieces that I've done so check back for that.

White Paper Snow for the back cover of Humpty Dumpty Magazine

Time to Count Birds activity for Turtle Magazine