Pose commissions for Justin (Gusto) and his girlfriend Tupelo to use on Wolfhome. Images (c) Me Characters (c) their respective owners.

Project 3

I want to design a set characters with a high level of detail to push and expand my skills. Children’s Illustration is the industry I am most interested in, I kept that in mind when creating a brief for this project. For this project I am to design 3-4 characters for a children’s story, the story I have chosen is “Father Frost". I must show research into other artists styles and sketches of my ideas. From this research and sketches I must produce 3-4 fully rendered images. 

I have chosen three characters to focus on and if I have time I will work on the final three. The three I have chosen are Father Frost, the poor father and his daughter the nice girl. Here are some basic sketches of ideas I have been working on for each character. 

Finished Book Cover

Finished book cover design "The Brave Tin Soldier"

Finished Vignettes

All Three completed Vignettes.

Enhancments

Each image has been enhanced in different ways, some methods are similar and some images require less editing than others. Here is how I enhanced one of the more complicated images.

I added two more colour layers and set one to “Color” and the other to “Overlay” the combination of the two added more intensity and depth to the colours of my image.

I found a free stock photo online of rippling water for the background. To this layer I added the “Sponge” filter in filter gallery.

To shade the tin soldier I added a second colour layer and used the dodge and burn tools to add shadows and highlights. These tools on a high strength can add very intense tones, which gave the soldier a shine and tin like appearance.  

In the previous image I felt the fish and water looked disjointed, as if they were two separate images and the fish was not submerged in it but simply on top of it.

To fix this I added a layer of blue on top of all the other layers set it to multiply and lowered the opacity slightly, giving the image over all a slight blue hue.  

I wanted to give the impression that water was moving fast and the fish was thrashing around to get to the tin soldier.

I found another free stock image online of water splashing and spiraling. In photoshop I edited the water so it looked like it was wrapping around the fish. I used various filters to take away the realistic appearance so it suited the drawing style. I set the water layer to multiply, duplicated it and set the second water layer to overlay to enhance the colours.

 

 

To create the classic children’s book appearance I put each of the images I created into vignettes. This also created a focus to my images and framed them nicely rather than having the images scrawl off the edges of the page.

Processes

I have been working on my vignettes for "The Brave Tin Soldier" I have chosen to use a process called grey scaling to shade and colour my images.

Each image starts with a basic sketch of the idea and then on a new layer I will refine the line art for the final image.  

Using the magic wand tool I select around the line work and inverse the selection, so only the area between the line work can be edited. I add a new layer beneath the line art and fill it in grey, to this grey layer I being to colour in rough shading and highlights, using a darker tone of grey and white. Once all the basic shading has been added I select filter, blur and use “Gaussian blur” to blend the tones together slightly and create a smoother appearance. This method of shading is what I mean by "grey scaling". 

For the colour layer I create a new layer above the line art and set this layer to “Multiply” which allows the shading on the layers beneath to show through.  

Character Design: Brave Tin Soldier

As part of my second project I have to produce 3 different character design sheets.

Paper Ballerina

Tin Soldier

Goblin