Fierce Grey Mouse; the design of Edie and Kay

Happy Easter everyone! Hope the sun is shining for you where ever you are! 
This blog post comes from my lovely new "studio", where, thanks to the lovely weather, I have been able to work this past week. Hope I can work from here next week too as it is very inspiring there. And the background music is great too, lots of tweeting birds and buzzing bumblebees.

With the Fierce Grey Mouse book App so close to completion I thought it might be nice to show you how Little Grey Mouse's friends Edie and Kay were developed.

When I first wrote the story my whole focus was on Little Grey Mouse, but when I decided he was to have some friends who were not mice, I went through a whole series of animals that could possibly be his friends, from giraffes to dogs from little kids to alpacas, from pelicans to cats, but in the end settled on a pig and a duck. They seemed the right kind of friends for a little mouse.


I started my usual process of sketching the real thing, lots of pigs, piglets and lots of different ducks and ducklings. Some from life and some from photos as the life models were not too good at standing still long enough. Here a few samples from my sketchbook:

I then started thinking of how I could paint them. What colours would suit them? 

too pink and smooth

too yellow and too young

I needed them to be less babyish, so got to this:

better, cute, but not quite right yet for Fierce Grey Mouse

I liked them, but they did not quite fit with Little Grey Mouse and were still quite babyish. They needed to have a bit more character of their own and have a more independent feel, able to go on an adventure on their own. For Edie I started putting different duck bits together and for Kay I tried her standing on her back legs:

almost there! Especially Edie. Kay needs a bit more work.

I felt I was almost there with these and all they needed now was a little bit more styling so they were less realistic. They also needed placing in Little Grey Mouse's semi abstract environment so I could see if they could happily live in Little Grey Mouse's world:

Yay! I've finally got it!

For me that worked, they seemed happy and content amongst the paint splashes and collaged bits of different papers. Edie and Kay were born! They were ready for their adventure in "Fierce Grey Mouse".

To see Edie and Kay move and fully come to live, soon you can read all about their adventure with Little Grey Mouse by downloading the "Fierce Grey Mouse" app for iPad, iPhone and iPod from iTunes or through Tizio. We're almost done. I will keep you posted through twitter, Facebook and my website too.

In the mean time, enjoy the Easter break. Have a good one and eat loads of chocolate! I know we will. Yum!

Owls 2

This blog post is written with a big box of tissues on my desk. Not because I'm sad, but because somehow I caught a most dreadful cold : 0( Luckily I have some owl drawings to cheer me up! 

Last week I wrote about the first stage of how I develop animal characters by first drawing them as close to nature as possible (but with a few of my own bits thrown in). Where possible I like to draw the animals from real life, but as this is not always an option, I use extensive photo reference. I always have my big folder full of all sorts of animal and people pictures on my desk. Every time I see an interesting picture, the file gets a bit bigger!

After I have a good feel for what makes up the particular animal, what are its main shapes and how can I make compositions with it, I will start thinking of what of his or her characteristics I would like to use. Sometimes this means I put 2 animals together, for example in "Gone Fishing!" Kay is a mixture of a hare and a rabbit with a little bit of human thrown into the mix.

For the owls I decided to make them a combination of fledgling owls and grown up owls, barn owls and little owls. I tried to select all the different bits that I found appealing in each of those and mixed them up so that the overall still says: "I am an owl" but you cannot really tell what kind of owl or what age. Although by making them fluffy they do look young, which is useful as they are meant for a children's story (a lovely fabel written by Mark Ellis).

Then comes the big question: "How to illustrate them so that they have the right feel for the story?" In my illustrations I tend to favour 3 different techniques: pen and ink with watercolour (as Kay above is), watercolour and 4B graphite or acrylics with colouring pencil and sometimes some collage thrown in for good measure (the technique I used to create "Fierce Grey Mouse"). To see what that would look like and feel like for the owls, I made a few sample sketches and painted them in the 3 different ways:

Painting them in these different ways gives me a good view of what I can do with the composition for the pages too. It also makes me more and more familiar with drawing the animals, which is useful for when I make the real illustrations.

Next I sketched out thumbnails for each of the pages of the picture book. They are very rough sketches, mainly to indicate where things go, including space for text. So we get a good idea of the flow of the story. There is no detail, it is mainly to help bring ideas across. 

With all these pieces ready I am now all set to arrange a meeting with the writer (Mark Ellis) of "Owls" to take illustrating his picture book to the next stage! Ah choo! (excuse me whilst I use another tissue...)

Owls!

Whilst the geniuses at Tizio BV are working hard to get Fierce Grey Mouse finished as interactive App, I have started on 2 new illustration projects. Those of you who follow me on Twitter or Facebook have probably noticed that I have been drawing lots of owls recently. The nice thing is that both projects feature owls in their stories. Which makes me feel very lucky as I love drawing birds.


The first project is illustrations for a series of beautifully written fables written by Mark Ellis. The stories are gentle, hypnotic and have a beautiful sense of peace, making them the perfect bedtime stories. The first fable I started working on is called "Owls" and has of course got plenty of owls in it!


The second project is the picture book for adults that I am writing. The book deals with the topic of depression, although it never actually mentions the word depression. It takes the reader to a parallel world in which the "heroine" of the story is trapped in a binding spell, making her spellbound. Owls feature in this story as triggers of memories.There are other symbolic birds, flowers and objects in the illustrations, but more about that in a future blog!


The nice thing is that for both stories I need to draw owls, the difficult part is that the owls need to be very different in feel and expression for the two very different stories. So I started where I always start, studying and drawing the real thing. First as loose sketches:

This to get a feel for the owl shapes. Then I start drawing the owls in more detail to learn what makes an owl? Sounds strange? Well, when you want to change something into a cartoon or stylised version of the thing you first need to know what it really looks like. How it works, what makes it what it is? What is different from other birds in the owls' case. We all know what an owl looks like, but to get to a stylised version that is believable  it really does help to do some more detailed drawings first. It will help later with putting compositions together too, as you have a good feel for shapes.

I then start thinking about composition and interaction between the owls and their environment. I like triangles, W's, M's and curves in compositions. It gives the page more dynamic and makes it more expressive. So I just start playing a bit with wing shapes and positioning of trees etc. to see how I can create a flow and focus by exaggerating sizes of owls and wing shapes. Also I start thinking of open space for text.

The next thing is expression. At the moment they are all quite sweet, which I think works for Mark Ellis' lovely fables. However, for my picture book about depression, they need to look a lot more melancholic and haunting. And that is my next challenge. Getting the right expression and right feel to each owl to suit each story. When that is done I can finally start to stylise them and also give them colour and select a method of painting them. Will it be pen and ink and watercolour? Or acrylics, gouaches, coloured pencils or collage? Or maybe a mixture of all? But that is my job for the coming week! Things are far from ready, but with a bit of luck I'll be able to show you the next stage in next week's blog post.

To end this week's blog post I will leave you with 2 other sketches that contain some other symbolism I am playing with in the depression story:

Not sure where it will all lead to, but that's the lovely thing about being at the sketching stage. So many possibilities still open!

To be continued...