Costuming characters

I’m currently working as an artist-in-residence at a local school, helping a Grade 5/6 class create heroic characters. In the first week, we started by brainstorming. In the second workshop, we really cranked up the fun factor, tackling our characters from the perspective of costumes and props.

To help with this, I brought in my gadget kit and my costume kit. The gadget kit is essentially just a box of stuff that other people throw out—odds and ends like milk bottle caps, wires, pipes, plastic rollers . . . you name it. All of this looks like junk, until you add it to something like this:

The above contraption is a piece I built for my wife’s halloween costume. None of my students are building something quite so elaborate, but are concentrating on more achievable things, such as smaller gizmos, such as decorated keys. (I found these really expensive keys from the craft store and many of the kids have hot-glued plastic jewels or metal gears to give them an other-worldly look.)

The other fun part of this class was costume design. I brought in a kit of fabric swatches, buttons, and hair samples and the students have collected samples to go along side the character profiles they are developing. The students had a lot of fun picking out the exact hair color of their characters and the different textures for their clothing. This gave them a different way to visualize their characters and helped enrich their understanding of them, too.

Here’s some of the photos from all the marvelous mayhem . . .

One of the students informed me that this was her favorite project all year (which I could tell because her and entire group of friends opted to skip recess to keep working on their designs.)

For the next workshop, we will be concentrating on illustration tips and techniques.

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The art of creating heroes

One of the projects I’m working on this fall is an artist-in-residency at a local elementary school. This is a neat five-week project in which I work with a single classroom of Grade 5 and 6 students to develop and design heroic characters. Our end project is to create a detailed display that will show the different aspects of the character, including a written profile, a detailed illustration, a pose and expression model sheet, and some three-dimensional props.

For the first session, I introduced the topic by discussing famous characters from literature and film and showing some of the common traits and themes we find in those characters’  journeys. I also showed the students how I came to develop some of my own heroic characters, not only in my Kendra Kandlestar series, but for a new book I’m working on. I brought in a stack of my brainstorming journals and the students were able to flip through and discover some of my different character-building pages.

Afterwards, the students were each given their own sketchbooks and they set to work doing some brainstorming of their own, concentrating on unique abilities, specific physical traits, and interesting names. (I’m a big believer in interesting names!)

We’ve actually already completed the second workshop, in which we attacked our character design from a tactile perspective, building props and imagining costumes. But I will talk about in a separate post—I’ve been so busy, I’m playing catch up!

Poster design for the Summer Reading Club

I’m hard at work on the illustrations for the BC library system’s 2016 summer reading club. In previous posts, I chronicled the development and design of the characters that are going to populate the different material: the poster, the reading record, and so forth. The theme is “travel.”

Those characters have been approved, so now I’m working on the design of the poster. (The other material will come next; the poster is the most important piece.)

Here are some of my initial concepts:

As you can see, I was toying with the idea of a vertical design and a steampunk frame. I liked the idea of the book transforming into a plane, and that seems to be the part everyone on the library team has been agreeing on.

They asked me to make the frame even more steampunk, but to try and avoid gears since gears played very heavily in their concept from last year. So it’s been quite a challenge to make something looked steampunk without the quintessential symbol of that genre. But I think I’ve got it now, as can be seen in this cobbled together version of the poster:

No gears! I decided to make the poster horizontal, to stretch out process of transformation from the portal passport into the plane. The library team asked for one additional stage of transformation between the book and the plane; initially, I wasn’t sure if that could be fit in, but I think it does work quite nicely.

In the corner of the poster, I’ve added some insets of different vehicles that the portal passport might transform into. I had originally sketched some images of our crew—the flying squirrel, travel bug, and polar bear—in different locales, but the library team wants to avoid any perceived stereotypes. So do I, I suppose. Though I did like my polar bear wearing his traditional peaked Asian hat. (For me this wasn’t meant to perpetuate a stereotype, but a homage to my own travels in Asia. I wear those hats all the time when I’m in Asia; they’re really good at keeping out the heat.)

In any case, we’re going to try and represent travel through these different vehicles being in different landscapes. Hence the submarine in water, the rocket in space, and the walker in the jungle:

Now I’m hard at work inking and colourizing the individual components. It’s all coming together, slowly but surely. Which is good—I have less than three weeks to complete!

Designing characters for the BC Library’s Summer Reading Club ~ Round 5

I’ve been posting some of the artwork that I’ve been doing for the BC Summer Reading Club these past few weeks, but it’s now my work on the project is officially official.

So far, I’ve mostly been designing the look and feel of the characters that we are going to use for the material. Here’s the final versions of them—as you can see, we decided to go with a more “sketchy” look for the style of artwork:

Our pilot, the flying squirrel:

Our navigator, the travel bug:

Our engineer: the polar bear:

I’ve also been working on the designs for the “portal passport”. My first attempt was a bit flat . . .

So the team at the BC Library asked me to “up” the gadget factor, which I did:

It’s by means of this book that the characters will take their travels. (The theme of the 2016 reading club is “Book a trip”.) I’m not sure if we’re going to use them, but I’ve sketched some (mis)adventures that the crew has in various locations around the world.

The creation of Kendra Kandlestar: Reading ’Tween the Lines

In my ongoing blog series to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the publication of Kendra Kandlestar and the Box of Whispers, I’ve talked about the heroes, the antagonists, and the inspiration for the overall idea. Today’s topic is the setting.

Just like many of the characters in the book, the setting of the story went through a significant transformation. Originally, I had called this place where the tiny folk lived the Land of Tween. This was because they lived “Between Here and There.”

However, this was over ten years ago, and the term “Tween” was quickly being taken over by the media as a reference to those kids who weren’t quite kids anymore—but weren’t teenagers either.

I decided I need to change Tween to something else. This was one of those cases where the simplest decision became the easiest! I chopped off the first two letters and called it the land of “Een.”

Originally the inhabitants of the magic land in the story were going to be all manner of fairy-tale characters such as pixies, gnomes, and elves. This is demonstrated in the early drawing of Winter Woodsong shown below.

As you can see, she was originally a fairy, complete with star-dusted wings. Because of this starry appearance, she was first known as Summer Starlight, but eventually it seemed more appropriate to change the name of the “Eldest of the Elders” to Winter Woodsong.

Certain locations within the Land of Een also went through some changes as I developed the story.

Below, you can see a concept sketch of the Elder Stone.

As shown by that drawing, there is a time when I thought the home of the Council of Elders should look more like a towering castle, with flags and ornamentation.

Eventually, I decided I wanted it to look more like a natural rock, as is shown in the final illustration:

The idea is that you might walk right past it and—unless you were really looking closely—you might not even notice it. Interestingly, I revisited the idea of the Elder Stone as an opulent castle in Books 4 and 5 of the series.

The Box of Whispers also established the Magic Curtain, which is the border that surrounds the Land of Een. In the original publication of the book, there was no overall map of Een, though you could see part of its border in this map from Professor Bumblebean’s notes:

The idea of the Magic Curtain, this boundary that guards and hides Een from the outside world, came to play a major role in future Kendra Kandlestar books.

In the next post, I’ll discuss some of the inspirations for the visual design of the overall book.

Designing characters for the BC Library’s Summer Reading Club ~ Round 3 (and 4!)

A couple of weeks ago, I posted sketches of characters that I’ve been working on for the BC Library Association’s 2016 summer reading club material. I’ve been working hard to fine-tune those characters, so thought I’d post some of the updated designs.

There has been some back and forth here, as the team and I tried to narrow down our crew members who will embark on an adventure via a sort of “portal passport.” We finally decided to go with the crew of a flying squirrel (as a pilot), a polar bear (as an engineer), and a travel bug (as a navigator).

Here’s my initial drawings of the final crew . . .

The library team was quite happy with this cast, but did ask for some changes. For the squirrel, they wanted to emphasize that she’s a girl, so I smoothed out her mouth, accentuated her eyelashes and offered some different color combinations for her attire.  Here she is, in blue, green, and purple:

The team also wanted me to explore some brighter colors for the bug’s clothing, so I produced a few options, even playing with the color of his skin, too.

They were pretty happy with the polar bear engineer, so I didn’t make any changes to his coloring or design.

I also offered an initial design of what the portal passport could look like. In our imaginations, this is a sort of steampunk book that takes our crew members on an imaginative journey. The actual name of the campaign is “book a trip”!

The creation of Kendra Kandlestar: Magic rabbits and parakeets

One of my projects this month has been to celebrate the ten-year-anniversary of The Box of Whispers, the first book in my Kendra Kandlestar series.

In an earlier post, I talked about how a single painting inspired the premise for the book. What I didn’t say was that it also served as the inspiration for the characters.

That painting, as you can see in the close up below, featured a rabbit, a parakeet, a mouse, a cricket, a gnome-like character, and—of course—the giant dragon.

All of these characters made it into the earliest drafts of the story, which back in 2002 was entitled Luka Long-Ears and the Box of Whispers. That’s right—there was NO Kendra to be found anywhere in those pages. Instead, it was the central character of Luka the rabbit that set off on the frightening journey to recover the precious box, which—by the end of the story—contains her own dark secret.

I loved the character of Luka. But as I began to work more earnestly on the book, I began to feel that the themes and messages of the story were outgrowing little Luka. After all, a rabbit character seemed to fit better with a very young audience, and it was fast becoming apparent to me that the story I was writing was better suited for readers slightly older in age. I felt that the story would be stronger if it was led by a more human-like character.

So, alas, I made the hard decision to change Luka into the Elfish little Kendra. It was a lot of work to make the change, for it involved not only rewriting the story, but—as the illustrator—completely rethinking the visuals of the book. As you can see by the illustrations below, I had already completed several pieces of artwork featuring Luka. Even my original draft of the cover gave the spotlight to the long-eared rabbit!

Here’s a page from my sketchbook, showing some of the early designs for Kendra as an Een:

As for Luka, she did not disappear entirely. Readers who pay close attention will see that Kendra has a lot of rabbit in her character! Not only does she have magical carrot seeds, she also has long braids (instead of long ears), which she tugs fretfully throughout her adventures.

And, for those of you who have paid really close attention, you will still catch a reference to Luka in the book. Eventually, I decided that Luka Long-Ears is a talented tailor living in the Faun’s End. In Book 3, Kendra Kandlestar and the Shard from Greeve, you can even find a picture of Luka as she sews Kendra’s robe.

Of course, Luka wasn’t the only character to undergo a dramatic change. Originally, Luka’s parental figure wasn’t Uncle Griffinskitch, but her wise old friend Tuttleburg the parakeet. Since the original painting showed Tuttleburg with a wizard’s hat, I made him into a magical bird.

Since Tuttleburg originally filled the role of Kendra’s guardian, he had to do all the important things such as participating in the Council of Elders—though, as a parakeet, he had a perch instead of a chair.

Once I made the decision to replace Luka with Kendra, it seemed to make sense to make Tuttleburg the Uncle figure—and that meant he could no longer be a parakeet.

Interestingly, I had already developed a minor gnome-like character called Wolden Whitebeard. I loved the original illustration of him:

So I decided to promote him to be a main character. So really Tuttleburg and Wolden united to become old Uncle Griffinskitch.

Children often ask me how I came up with the name of Uncle Griffinskitch. I’m afraid the answer is rather silly. He is named after my cat, who goes by Griffin publicly, but to close friends and family is known as Skitch. When Griffin was a kitten, his tiny fuzzy body promised a blissful, short-haired future. Alas, he now sports so much hair that he indeed rivals his fictitious counterpart, Uncle Griffinskitch.

The change from Luka and Tuttleburg to Kendra and Griffinskitch is easily the boldest difference between the early drafts of the manuscript and the final book. However, there were a few other characters who experienced some growth, as it were. If you look back at that original painting, you will see that the gnome character originally held a sword and was fairly old, sporting a gray beard. He was known in my first draft of the book as Grimble Green. But I decided to turn him into a Professor who loved books. As you can see by the illustration below, Grimble Green kept his age for a time, sporting an elder’s beard:

As time went by, I decided that I wanted Uncle Griffinskitch to be the clear elder and leader of our impetuous band of heroes. So Bumblebean became younger and a bit more bumbling.

Of course the other thing the character had lost during his transition was his sword. I needed to find a new warrior to help the heroes in their quest for the Box of Whispers. I decided that the cricket from the original painting—now a grasshopper known as Juniper Jinx—would be the soldier. I thought it would be funny to make the smallest character in the story the strongest.

Jinx now became as tough as the hide of the monsters she would fight throughout the book. Of course, because grasshoppers have more than two arms, I thought it would be a good idea to give her enough weapons for all of her hands. Here’s an early sketch for her:

I suppose Oki, the little mouse, is the only one who really didn’t change through any of the drafts of the story. Not only did he remain timid and smart, he was always the best friend of the story’s heroine. And, of course, he always got to carry the key to the fabled Box of Whispers!

Designing characters for the BC Library’s Summer Reading Club ~ Round 2

A couple of weeks ago I posted some of my initial sketches that I’ve been working on for the BC Library Association’s 2016 summer reading club marketing material.

Round 1 resulted in the team picking the flying squirrel to be the pilot on our imaginary crew and the travel bug as our navigator. So, for Round 2, I’ve made a few refinements to these characters . . .

However, the team also wanted to try out some bigger animals, so after flipping through my animal encyclopedia, I picked a few of my favorite creatures and produced the sketches below. My idea is that one of these bigger animals will serve as the crew’s engineer.

Desert Fox

Kangaroo

Polar Bear

Rhino

Who will make the cut? Well, we’ll just have to see whom the team picks . . .

Designing characters for the BC Library’s Summer Reading Club ~ Round 1

While I was touring through England and Ireland last month, I was approached with a delightful project: to illustrate the material for the library’s 2016 Summer Reading Club. It would mean following in some pretty big footsteps; in past years, the library has worked with some pretty talented illustrators: Jeremy Tankard, Shayne Letain, and Mike Deas—just to name a few.

However, I simply had to take this project. After all, the theme is “TRAVEL” . . . and I’ve done quite a bit of that recently (including being on an overseas trip when the project was offered). It just seemed a good fit!

The project is not without its challenges, since I need to design characters and produce illustrations that will speak to a wide age range, different cultural sensibilities, and both boys and girls. I decided I would chronicle each of the stages, as much as I can, on my blog . . . so here goes! Round 1 . . .

The first idea I came up with for a character was a “travel bug.” Here are some my sketches:

Of course, the other thing I thought about is a general cast of animal characters, things that you might find in your backyard. So here’s my collection of rodents and other critters:

Our end task will be to come up with a team of three characters that are on a travel adventure. I have this idea of them using this steampunked book as a sort of portal passport. I haven’t gotten too far down the road of that design since I have been mostly concentrating on the characters, but here are a couple of sketches:

So far, the team at the library has liked a lot of the designs . . . I just need to make sure they’re not too cute so I can hit that “tween” audience. Yep, that’s a challenge, because I still need to interest the younger kids, too.

Well, as they say, back to the drawing board . . .

Introducing Timmons Thunderclaws

As part of the celebrations for the release of my new book, Kendra Kandlestar and the Search for Arazeen, I am introducing a new character each week. So far, I’ve introduced Tuttleferd T. Thistle Toe, Paipo Plumpuddle, and Charla Charmsong.

This week’s character is another animal: Timmons Thunderclaws.

Who he is:

In The Search for Arazeen, this ornery old badger serves in the underground resistance known as Knights of Winter. In his much younger days, he served in the role of captain of the Een Guard. He retired from that position to try and live out his days in solitude in the outskirts of Een, but his loyalty to to the sorceress Winter Woodsong  compelled him to return and join her resistance movement against the would-be emperor, Burdock Brown.

Where he came from:
To be honest, Timmons Thunderclaws isn’t an entirely new character. He was mentioned in Book 3, The Shard from Greeve. Winter Woodsong sent Kendra and her friends to go hide with the badger, but they never made it that far, and ended up getting sidetracked. Even though we didn’t get to meet Timmons in person, I liked the idea of the character enough to then show him in Book 4, The Crack in Kazah. Timmons appeared during a scene when Kendra travelled back in time and saw the badger guarding the Elder Stone during her parents’ youth. He was never mentioned by name, but he did get an illustration:

Finally, in The Search for Arazeen, Timmons gets some proper page time, complete with significant lines of dialogue. He plays an important role in the events at the end of the book. He represents one of those minor characters who has turned out to be a particular favorite of mine.