Here are some of my character sketches. I tried various different styles, ranging from cute and babyish to more cartoonish. I like the first elephant design because I feel like it is more realistic than the others but that it is also quite fun because of the roundness of the design. However, I do quite like the look of the baby elephant in the bottom right hand corner which has the mouse on its trunk.

My favourite mouse is the bottom one. I like this design because again I think it works quite well; it is clear that it is a mouse and not a rat, which I think some of my other sketches suffered from. I also think it looks quite cute and easy to sympathise with, which I want my audience to do at this point. However I do also quite like the mouse that is stood with the elephant in the first design. I’m not sure however if I want the mouse to be standing up like a human or to look more animal and be on all fours.

 

So I’ve now actually come up with my idea. I am going to keep with the anxiety and use animals to indicate this, as I think children do relate to animals especially in stories. To begin with, I thought perhaps I would use a child, but my drawing skills quickly rendered that moot. Instead, I began sketching out the idea of a mouse. Mice in general media usually indicate anxiety or terror, so I thought that this would resonate with children quite well. Then immediately from mice, my brain conjured up the idea of an elephant.

Normally, elephants are the ones scared of mice in television or cartoons. But I wanted to flip it on its head because I felt that the elephant scared of the mouse was a little cliché. So what if the mouse was the one scared of the elephant? He’d have every reason to be. So my idea has become a mouse afraid of the world, and he befriends an elephant somehow. Initially scared of the elephant, even though it is very friendly, eventually the elephant (named Eliza, perhaps) teaches the mouse that although there are scary things in the world, it’s okay if you have a friend to help take them on.

I think I quite like this idea. It addresses a serious issue, as described by the brief, but it also teaches children compassion and how to treat a friend suffering from anxiety, when it might be easy to brush them off. Also, it teaches the importance of friendship.

Unfortunately, my cat idea has quickly become too complicated. I wasn’t sure exactly how to portray a cat wanting to act like a bird or a fish without making the issue seem too trivial, and I wasn’t sure how I could explain without sounding patronizing or too confusing to a child. I thought perhaps that this idea would work much better if it was actually written as a novel or a graphic novel, which could give greater depth to the idea and also perhaps simplify it a little for a younger audience – though possibly not quite as young as 5 or 6.

Being unsure about what idea to create now that I have abandoned my cat idea, I have instead decided to address an issue is that is quite close to home to me. The idea of using anxiety struck me one day while I was attempt to sketch out a few ideas. I knew that children often experience anxiety when they are left alone, for example. I thought that this idea would work because children would understand it more as every child experiences it at one point.

More on this idea to come later, when I’ve thought about some more ideas.

So after talking to my group and Mike, my idea is tentatively going to be about a cat that wanted to be a dog. The idea behind this would be that the cat was actually a metaphor for being transgender, and that the reason why it wanted to be a dog was because it felt uncomfortable in its own skin. The plot behind it would be that the cat was unsure about who it wanted to be, and so it would imitate different animals in the hope that it would eventually be who it wanted to be. When it found a dog it realised that’s who it wanted to be all along, and its friends and family would be happy that it had eventually become happy too, and it would be accepted by its fellow dogs as another dog.

I did some tentative sketches and coloured some drawings of what potentially the cat and a dog might look like in the book itself.

I know the images aren’t great but hopefully I can get some clearer drawings down when I get down to sketching properly. It was pointed out to me that my cat looks like Simon the Cat, which was actually unintentional, but I did some research and I guess I could consider the comics an influence because I do like the rounded style of Simon Tofield’s drawings, especially the way the cat is depicted as quite fat and thick-looking.

As I mentioned previously in my post about book research, I love Quentin Blake’s style. I grew up on Roald Dahl’s books, and Quentin Blake’s illustrations always stood out to me and attracted my attention. The simplicity of the drawings along with the splashes of colour that didn’t always sit within the lines for some reason always drew my eye. I also like the way he uses watercolours to create bright, often smudged, drawings, with little attention to keeping the idea itself neat and tidy. Below are several examples of his drawings that are inspiring me in what exactly my illustrations and story should look like. I specifically looked at animals because those drawings were always what stood out most to me as a child.