Panic

So this is just a short one. I've got really into sketching recently. It's a combination of being super poor right now, spending a bit of time with a friend of mine, Otto, who is pretty awesome at it and, lastly, me being a naturally competitive ass.

I'm writing and illustrating a children's book called The Cloud Shepherd (because, you know, clouds look like sheep amIright?) and a lot of the sketches are me trying to work out how characters and scenes look before I try to write them. Anyway, the other day I lost one of my sketch books (I'll negate any would-be suspense right now by telling you I re-found it in my underwear drawer) and it sent me into a bit of a panic. So I decided to upload a few of the things I've been working on recently - it'd also be nice to know whether people like them and would be interested in seeing more - maybe with the accompanying text.

 Here're some designs for the main characters. The first was a quick sketch in biro based on a picture by Shaun Tan (boss) called Portrait of the Artist. I then tried to emulate it in the second picture, changing the hairline and colour, rounding the face and changing the skin tone. I also added a sky-whale because sky-whale.

This is the final design for the main character. I gave him more sticky-outy ears because I tend to draw a lot of things like that... not too sure why... and rounded the face some more. I really like the paint apron as part of his design so I'll be keeping that and I gave him a cloud-dog to play with.

Here he is again, with another of him jumping for a cloud and wearing an overcoat, I'm not the best at legs so I'm trying to work on those a bit more - I'll let you be the judge over whether I manage to pull it off or not.

Here are the first sketches of the titular character, the Cloud Shepherd. He's a completely original design  but I wanted to give him a monk type feel and I quite like the belt made of rope that you get in a lot of monks and priests (think friar Tuck in the disney version of Robin Hood). In the book his beard is quite cloud-like and tends to float off on its own a lot so he has to keep tucking it into his belt.

In the end I quite liked the fatter, squatter version. I played around with a few more ideas in a notepad before I went  with the one below, giving him bigger ears, a darker skin tone and eyebrows to match the beard.

Here's a sketch with the final two character designs. I've played around with a lot of different versions. I didn't want to upload those because a lot of them are unfinished and messy. But anyway Yash and the Cloud Shepherd:

This one I did a while ago on the tube which explains the really crap shading in the sky. I was just playing with different cloud shapes and quite liked the idea that above the clouds you'd have a cool looking flip with the bright white below.

This one weirdly enough started out as a quick sketch of a house in between Westminster and Victoria (the one on the right). But I thought it'd look cooler as an underwater scene. (Yasmin if you're reading this there's a you-know-what on the left so you might want to skip this one - though you can only see half of it). The idea is that the world has flooded and a couple have come back as explorers hundreds of years later to try and learn about what life was like. I also have a life-long dream of becoming an underwater detective and this is what I imagine it to be like.

 This one's super old. I did it... in India maybe? Anyway it was in a work text book and it's a sub-story in the main book. I'm not the best at shading and you can see how not a lot of the shadows make a lot of sense in it, but I've think I've made a lot of progression with some of the more recent ones. It's the castle of the raven king wooOOOoo. (By the way, Ravens and Crows are jerks - see blog post 1).

 Lastly here're some random ones. The eyes and lips are ones I saw Otto doing a few weeks ago and thought I'd have a go at. Hers are better. Also more dinosaur detective sketches - GET HYPED.

If you've made it this far, thanks a lot! I'd appreciate the feedback, especially negative - I know I've got a long way to go so anything people can suggest would be awesome, even if it's just "dinosaurs are lame" (though, if so, you're only hurting yourself). But yeah.. George out.