Just a quick update on one of the pages. I decided to colour in the rest of the house but in a softer colour to make it seem more cramped. I also highlighted more with a darker version of that colour where I thought the structure of the house itself would be. I also placed Meep inside his house just so the audience would be aware that it was in fact his house. I also coloured over the walls again as I noticed there was some sketches underneath the paint that I hadn’t seen previously where I had rubbed them out in my initial paper sketch.

 

 

These are the two character designs of Eliza the elephant and Meep the mouse. There are before and after shots. The before shots are the ones on the left and are the ones that I presented to the design group including Mike. The after shots are the ones on the right and what I took into consideration after I had spoken to the group and Mike.

With both characters I was told that I needed to soften the dark colours that I had decided to highlight around their bodies as they were too much. In addition to this I also decided to use softer colours in general, because I could see that it wasn’t as realistic as I had wanted it to be with the stronger colours. With Meep I also decided to shorten his nose and to give him a sad facial expression, because I hadn’t yet included that and I felt it was very important to his character.

With Eliza, I wanted to make sure it looked like she was smiling, as she was very cheerful and the opposite of Meep in nearly every sense. The flower I could erase if I wanted to but I wanted this to her initial character design. I quite like these characters as I feel they reflect the ideas that I wanted to show to my audience.

This is one of the next pages of my book. Again, I sketched the idea out, scanned it into Photoshop and then edited it that way. This is supposed to be the mouse’s house (who I have named Meep) inside the tree, which was shown earlier. I tried to make the inside of the house look boring and not exactly appealing to live in, because Meep’s life is boring as it is dominated by his anxiety. Therefore I used dull colours and made the house look small and curved inwards to demonstrate his feelings of being trapped inside.

I also used these colours to remind the audience that the mouse does in fact live inside the tree. I included a television as a funny reminder that Meep does err on the side of humanity. I also thought it might be quite boring for him if he literally had nothing to do inside!

Again, I tried to copy Quentin Blake’s style which I think I achieved better than the previous post. I’m not sure if I should keep the white canvas underneath or if I should cover that, but I will address that situation later.

This is my first experiment with colouring in the first scene of the book. I sketched the tree out first along with the background, and then scanned it into Photoshop and edited it with my tablet on there. I tried to copy Quentin Blake’s style of using a softer shade of colour and working in quick strokes to make it seem more realistic but I’m not entirely sure that it has worked. I think what I will have to do is go over the pencil lines on Photoshop with the pen tool to make sure they stand out more, and then colour the work in. I also think I need to maybe work a bit more steadily because the colours have blended too much and at this point it just looks too messy.

Here are some of my previous sketches coloured in. I wasn’t sure what kind of colour scheme I wanted to go with, and whether or not I wanted it to be realistic or more surreal. As you can see, I experimented with both at this point. I tried making the elephant blue and the mouse green, but I felt like this just looked silly and could distract the audience from the serious message of the book itself. I tried colouring the elephant more of a brown colour and the mouse a yellow to still maybe add some fun to it, but this still didn’t work; the colours just didn’t match up right in my opinion. I think I will just have to stick to the more realistic approach with greys and blacks for the elephant, and browns and pinks for the mouse.

I’ve decided that I would like to use the rounder bigger elephant for my final design of my character and not the baby elephant, as it was difficult to draw a mouse that matched the baby elephant’s design without the mouse itself being too small. As I wanted the audience to see the world through the mouse’s perspective this wouldn’t have worked. I also want the mouse to be more realistic so I have scrapped the idea of the mouse standing up and am going to stick with the mouse on all fours.