Character Design

I decided that the characters I had designed so far didn't work with the subject matter of the book so worked on some more simplified characters. i wanted to use block shapes but maintain some feeling of hand made quality about them so I used the pen tool in illustrator and the eraser to make sure all the shapes weren't 'perfect'. As with the other characters i worked on I wanted to see how well I could portray emotion using simple shapes to make up facial expressions.

 

I had some ideas of how I wanted to layout certain pages. These key pages are the ones I thought would set the tone for the book and would need to work well or the entire story would struggle. I decided that I needed to use visual aspects that continue through the whole book to make it clear which characters were present on each page. The book covers a long period of time so I had to decide which elements would change and which would need to stay the same. The character of the mum that has died in the book but is present on nearly every page is wearing the same clothes except when there is a specific reason, for example in the page where she is being dropped off at school she is wearing the school uniform.

I kept the mums hair the same throughout but changed the colour to show the aging process and passing of time. In the same way I showed the dad in the book as being bald even though he had long hair when they got married. I want the book to engage people and be thought provoking so don't want to blur the messages by making the character progression complicated.

because of the number of pages we are allowed and the complexity of the narrative I want to show I have set up links between the pages that will hopefully be understandable without being blatant. This is a difficult balance to get right and if I haven't managed to do it well it could mean the story loses meaning and continuity. On the other hand if the story is overly obvious there is less of an interaction with the person viewing it and could create a feeling of detachment. In the book one of the pages will be set at the mums funeral with the son, daughter and husband thinking about her, I will use a cartoon like thought bubble to show this. On the next page I want to show the mum as a child with her parents as a memory of the past. The link between the two pages is not necessarily obvious instantly but I think it should be fairly easy to decipher.