Wednesday 9 November 2011

Creating Doggy Personalities




I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself. Despite a lot of distractions, I got my head down last week and started to get my act together properly as the days wore on. 



At last I am drawing properly and I have managed to visualise the whole of the new story that John and I have been brainstorming. My doggy characters have grown tighter and more focussed the more times I've sketched them and I feel that each member of their little gang now has a quite distinct personality. 


I used my new book to choose different breeds that suggested personality types, then worked on further reflecting that in their body language, their voice and general demeanor. In this sketch though, they are having a bit of an argument with the dog above:



There's also a gang of rats in the story, most of whom are actually quite amenable, all except their rather scary leader. 




We decided it would be funny to make the chief rat character a girl, and giving her a really girlie name would make her funnier still, so she is called Rosy. 



I have more school and festival visits coming up in the next 2 weeks, but now I have got warmed up, I am going to try and keep the stories going and begin work on a princess idea that has been in my sketchbook for a while. It's reassuring to feel I have at least made a little progress though.



4 comments:

Helen said...

Thanks for sharing this Lynne. It's so wonderful to see the characters develop on your page and I really look forward to seeing how the book goes.

Julie Clay Illustration said...

Well done Lynne for having the tenacity to stick at those sketches, even when you felt stuck as in the previous post. It all looks good. Hope you get somewhere with it, I really need to get some of my ideas down, it's that initial motivation and taking the first steps that can be so hard! Thanks for the post. Julie

Line Katrin Moe said...

So fun to see the sketches! Makes me smile. Thanks for sharing your work here. It is soo inspiring!

Sarah Anderson said...

Love that scary rat! :)