Week 3: People, Places, and Things - The Nature of Character

Although technically character sketches should have occurred at the beginning of the process, I held off because I wanted to get a head on the page compositions, and I discovered a good bit about the characters through the small sketches of the page thumbnails. I almost feel like I was viewing the characters from far away and began getting closer to them as I worked on the story more and more.

There are five primary characters in the story and a small group of bystanders in one scene.  It has been awhile since I've drawn portrait style images of characters so this took some warming up.  I have some fairly specific reference material I'm working from so it was a little disappointing with the first round of sketches because they looked nothing like my goal.  I know that in the end it is the final images that count, but it is a bit disheartening when you can't get what's in your head to look anything like what you draw.  Every road has speed bumps or pot holes though.  This is the part of the thumbnail and rough sketch process that always slowed me down before.  Literally - back to the drawing board!  ha.

Also during this process I sketched the house from the story as well as a large exterior environment where an important scene occurs.  I guess that makes for seven characters - ish. For the house I did an elevation study as well as an interior layout.  Mind you, my skills do not lie in interior design so both of these were fairly rough.  However it helped me to consider these because two scenes take place in the house in the same room area.  Laying out the house's floorplan on graph paper helped me to better determine where my "camera" angle would be for each of the scenes.

In the middle of the character studies and while I was drawing the page thumbnails I learned that a period of loose sketching or doodling helps my final product dramatically.  When I was working on the page thumbnails, I kind of did them all simultaneously and by the end the pages I drew were much sharper and clearer than the first pages.  Now I am trying to include about 30-45 minutes of sketching before I get to any serious drawing.  Not that sketching isn't serious drawing.  :-I   I'll let you know how all that turns out.