Characters

I made some character sheets to experiment. It has made it much easier to work out the problems with the characters by focusing in on one thing at a time. The first sheet I made was of facial expressions and helped me to come up with some visual signifiers relating to the dog character in the book. I use eyebrows a lot to show the emotion of my characters but I can't in this case but what i think does work is the ears of the dog, being up and pointed when happy and droopy when sad. When the dog is sad I have tried to make the dogs face droop to exaggerate his facial expressions. 

I am going to keep working in this way to try and find more visual signifiers and ways of manipulating the character facial expressions. I was thinking of illustrating the dogs feet separately from the dogs body the same way I usually illustrate people but I don't think it will work in this case it is not clear enough that the paws belong to the dog even when it is on a blank background with no other characters. I want to find a way to make the characters movements and postures as expressive as possible. 

So far I like the face of the dog and think I can find ways to show emotion but the body and legs are still a bit static and blocky. I need to research dogs anatomy so I can find out ways to create shape based characters that have a natural appearance. I have found that my shape based illustrations have been most effective when I have managed to find a simple shape that represents a suggests an object subtly and allows the viewers imagination to fill in the rest, even very subtle shapes like the different angles in a dogs leg. I cannot be lazy and work from assumptions of what I think a dog looks like. (if any of that makes sense)