Creating a character sheet is something I thought would be quite simple… it’s just a few poses, I can bash that out in a few days no problem. Little did I know the huge amount of work I was about to embark on! But first lets rewind a little, why did I decide to make this illustration in the first place? Prior to this, for the past few months I had been slowly chipping away at finishing my children’s illustration portfolio, working my way through the check list of things publishers look for. I had illustrated full scenes with characters inside, I had a wide range of colour palettes and moods in my pieces, and finally it was time to tackle the character sheet. Being able to see that you can successfully recreate the same character in different poses and have it consistently look the same, is something publishers are keen to see you have in your skill set. So this was it, the final illustration to complete the portfolio check list.
Before starting this sheet, I already had a hand full of crocodile sketches to pull from. These were the first crocs I had ever drawn, so they’re a little, well… bad. However, I quickly started to improve and find a style which worked well.
These were my next attempts which I was pleasantly surprised by, and with that my obsession with crocodiles was born! I then spent the next few days filling pages with these funny little creatures.
I decided the character sheet would look a little plain with just the crocodile, so I wanted to include his little buddy as well, this little girl (I haven’t decided on a name for her yet). Luckily, I had already illustrated these guys before inside a full scene, so a little bit of the character design process had already been figured out. I just had to make sure the girl on the sheet, matched the girl I had already painted.
With pages of sketches to choose from, It was time to pick which poses to turn in to final pieces, settling on the four above. I tried to pick a nice variety of poses: some close up, some full body, and from different angles, to best show off my skills. After figuring this out, I went back in to my sketchbook to properly figure out the positions and outfits of the little girl, as she had been a bit of an after thought.
After all that planning, it was time to move on to making the finals which ended up taking a whole week to put together! Luckily I already had a lot of crocodile textures painted from my previous illustration, so I had plenty of paper to choose from. Having said this, I was getting seriously low on my favourite textures, being left with the dregs after collaging the first two crocs. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you can’t make a good collage with bad paper! So as much as I didn’t want to, more paper had to be painted.
Before collaging the crocs, I traced a very faint outline of them on the paper first to give me a guide to work from. For really specific shapes like the bottom and top jaw which needed to slot together perfectly, I found it easiest to trace and cut out the shape first using tracing paper. This way I could cut out the perfect shape straight away, taking the guess work out. At first I was trying to eyeball it… but I quickly learned that was a very good way to waste paper.
With the crocodiles finished, I moved on to the girl which I was painting in acrylic. Even though the characters are made using two different techniques, I think they go together really nicely. Because I was trying to stay loose with the girl, I painted multiple versions of each pose to take the pressure off making something perfect, as trying to do that is a sure fire way to stiffen up! By painting multiple version, I was able to refine each pose with each attempt, while keeping my brush strokes loose and quick.
Here you can see how I’ve learnt from the mistakes of the first girl (on the left) and slightly altered my approach for my second try, changing the proportions to better suit the character.
When painting these, I knew I would have the power of photoshop to fix any mistakes. For instance on this girl, I forgot to leave a spot for the hand when I was painting the body. Instead of painting the whole thing again to fix such a minor issue, I painted a few different hand options on another page, which I just edited on afterwards, saving myself a lot of time!
This is another example of how I used photoshop to fix mistakes. I loved everything about the girl I had painted on the left, other than the small issue of messing up her arms; who knew it would be so difficult to paint arms folded!? So to fix this, I painted the body again, and performed a head transplant on photoshop.
Once I had finished all the different poses, I scanned everything in and began the editing process. On the left you can see the original scan. Whenever I scan anything in, particularly if it has a lot of light colours, it ends up looking quite washed out (this is probably because I have a VERY old scanner), which means I have to do a lot of colour correcting while editing. I also take the time to tweak anything which is bothering me: slightly fixing the proportions of the face, getting rid of any marks and dust you can see from the scanner, and just doing a general tidy!
Adding on the crocodile’s tutu!
The original scan
The final version
After a few hours of colour tweaking, re-positioning eyeballs, and cleaning up hair curls, the piece was finished, and with that so is my portfolio… well for now. My portfolio is something which will be constantly evolving, but at the moment I’m very happy for this piece to be a part of it, and hopefully I’ll be revisiting these characters in the future.
Thanks for reading
Emily :)