Character Sketches

Starting my Seven Ravens project the first thing I focused on was character design. I want to keep the look of things grounded in reality, but I don't intend to get super historically accurate. So the first thing I did was decide on a general time period and dig for reference. I chose the renaissance -roughly 16th century, and I wanted to keep it as German looking as possible (since it's a Grimm brothers fairy tale).

Then I spent the week sketching faces and playing around with design. This story has a lot of characters! The little girl is the most important, since she's the main character, but I spent a lot of time on the brothers as well. I wanted each one to feel like a realized character even though we don't see them much in the story, so I created personalities and back story for each one in my head while I sketched. Still have to work out the look of the parents.

Finally a real blog!

Well until now I've been using this blog as a very simple portfolio site (using the fabulous directions posted by Dan dos Santos on the Muddy Colors blog). Now that I've finally set up a real site using Wordpress, I can make this an actual blog!

I will use this first post to introduce a new project I am starting. In order to build up my portfolio I have decided to illustrate the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, "The Seven Ravens" as a 32 page picture book. (The text for this story can be found on Project Gutenberg.)

I plan to post updates on my progress at least once a week.  I have never consistently blogged before, so this may be a bit of a challenge for me.

Cinderella

Inari Okami

The Glass Coffin

The Wolf Lies

The Forgotten Castle