Character development - dog book

I have been working on new characters for the polar bear book. The book mainly focuses around the dog but the premise of the story is that a little girl says he's a polar bear while he's playing fetch in the park. The characters I made for the first version of the book were made up of blocky shapes and didn't really demonstrate much emotion so this was something I wanted to improve. I also wanted to use them to highlight the landscape and season as the story is set in the middle of winter. both the characters are wrapped up warm. The dog is often silhouetted against flashes of colour as he is the same colour as most of the composition, I wanted to use the white background of the page as snow to communicate an immersive snowy landscape. The landscape helps add to the dogs feelings that he might actually be a polar bear and not a dog. The characters are dressed in grey matching the buildings in the book and the rocks that are dotted around the landscape. There are flashes of colour in the form of evergreen trees and small details on the characters them selves. I wanted to only use colour in certain parts of the compositions to make them stand out. I have tried to make the greys used quite soft so that they don't seem too harsh or bleak for a childrens publication.

I need to
- start working with page layouts in mind
- more precisely plan the page layout of the book
- look at Macmillan submission requirements
- start working on the text for the book
- research how other books use page layouts and the language they use