One of my favorite parts of illustrating a story is coming up with the characters. When I was trying to come up with the character Alfie for "May I Please Have a Cookie?" I drew lots and lots of alligators. Above are just a few. Some of these guys I really like but they look too old or too edgy for Alfie. So I took bits from the various drawings that I liked and came up with the final character.
When I'm planning an illustration I like to make rough sketches and color studies of my ideas in Photoshop. This makes it easier to see how the ideas will work out.
I've taken several figure drawing classes over the years and none of them ever discussed drawing children. Proportions are relatively easy when dealing with adults because you can follow some basic rules. For instance, most adults are approximately 7 1/2 heads high. But proportions for children are different and to make matters worse the proportions change depending on age.
To help myself. I've made some proportion charts for different age children. These proportions are not true to life, but they seem to work for my drawing style. I think you'd find a real preschooler's head isn't as large as I show it here. But for some reason I need to make the heads larger or the children look too old. I wonder if it's because we grown-ups are always looking down at kids and that makes their heads look bigger us.
If you draw alot of children, I would recommend making your own charts. They can be a handy reference tool. You will need to experiment and see what works for you, because my proportions may not be right for your drawing style.
This is an illustration from a Norwegian book called "Fem, seks - det kommer en heks" (Five, six - there's a witch), written by Else H. Devold. The book teach kindergarteners mathematics through games. I painted about 50 illustrations for this.
This is one of those quotes that I found while I was doing some wedding planning...of all things!
“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.”-Dr. Seuss
“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
- Albert Einstein
I work digitally %100 percent so I rarely pick up actual paints, pencils, papers, etc. these days, except to do my non-work-related sketching. So in sharing my "favorite" art tool or product, I'm going to have to vote for my Cintiq. I've been drawing on tablets for years and it has become second nature to draw to my right and watch the drawing actually take place on a monitor to my left. No problem. But now, with the Cintiq, I can draw directly on the monitor itself, just as if I was drawing on paper or something. It's a most cool tool to have and I liked it so much, I also bought the baby Cintiq so I could take with me when I go south during winter. There are a lot of demos out there on You Tube and like places to see the Cintiq in action. So if you're curious, do a search and check them out. I'll just leave you with some pictures I took of them yesterday in my studio.
