New Designs

As promised, here is a photo of my first storyboard:

As you can see it is very sloppy and has some notes in the corner about page numbers.

Friday, I made a bigger, more detailed version. On this one I have all the words to the story written out in approximately all the right places. While drawing it, I noticed a few places I could cut down on pages, but still not enough to make it 32 pages, so I've decided to leave it. I did change a few of the layouts, however. There are still pages that I'm not 100% sure how I want them to look, but that's ok for now. 

I decided to make The Little Tiger of India an 8"x 8" book, for no better reason than I thought a square book would be cool. For the storyboard I did 2" x 2" squares. 

On Saturday, I cut out a few 8" x 8" squares of drawing paper as well as a 8" x 16" two-page spread. My intention was to draw several pages of my book in the actual book size, however, when I attempted to draw one of the poses, I just was not liking the illustration style I had chosen. It was very two-dimensional, and I was having a hard time figuring out how to position the head at different angles and still have it look the same. I also could not figure out how to make the Little Tiger crawl with such a big head. Because of these dilemmas, I decided to once more change the style. 

The new style

The the heads in the middle are the first ones I drew, trying mostly to stick to my original style. When that wasn't working, I tried something else and came up with the little guy on the bottom left. I tried him out in different poses, using photos as reference. I found he's actually tricky to draw from the front, but I think I figured it out. I was surprised at how easy it was to keep him looking like the same character. 

Next step was to see if I could draw other characters in the same style. I did me next. Most of my reference photos from India were of me in a hat, and as I love wearing hats, I decided it should be part of the book too. I think it will add interest and set the Stranger apart from the Little Tiger more as well. 

Me with my hair looking much nice here than it normally does. 

I'm super happy with how the sketch of me crawling looks! I have rarely drawn characters in different poses. I've stuck with portraits, and most of those smiling looking straight at the camera. I was always striving for something nice, professional looking. If I was going to spend so much time on a drawing, why would I do someone making a weird face? Or worse yet, one where you couldn't even see their face? That seems very silly to me now, but that's how I used to think. I could probably count on one hand the number of people I've drawn in action poses or even facing away from the paper. 

One other factor that went into me not drawing full persons, especially doing something other than standing still, is that I never wanted to memorize body proportions. I drew for fun, and that never seemed fun for me, so I never bothered with it. 

I'm thinking I maaaay need to look into it now. 

And a bonus picture for comparison:

Old style, I'll need to put the bow-tie on the new one

New style, but definitely not a final product

I'd ask you to vote on which one was your favorite, buuut I've already decided to do this new style. I would still be interested in your input though, what you like/don't like about this or that, and who knows? I may incorporate some of your ideas. 

I still need to work on my color scheme and painting skills, but I'm happy with the direction this project is headed.