Developing a character

This morning I woke with one task in mind. Developing a brand new original whimsical character for my next journal. If you have ever tried this before you would know how hard this is.
You have to think about face styles, body style, hair, choose from millions of types of lips and eyes and ears and noses and hands and feet and clothes...lalalalalalala
Oh my gosh.
Well how did I go about it all you may ask?
First I started with a little research on the ever so faithful google. I looked up favourite artists, downloaded other peoples cute drawings, looked in books and even resorted to looking at a few cloth dolls I have made.

I got them all together on the kitchen table and started looking at what I liked and disliked about each drawing I had gathered. I then tried to sketch all the things I liked into the one character. Sometimes this doesn't always work because they just don't match. For example you can't have a cute toddlers head on a long thin body etc.(Well you can if that's what your after, but I was not.)

With a lot of thinking and a bit of practice I did manage to come up with a new character that i feel fairly confident in capturing over and over within my journal pages. As this is the main thing to look at, you must be able to redraw that person in close likeness each time.

I found that I had a tendency to like certain features such as a flatter oval type head, long flowing hair covering one side of the face, lolly legs and a quite simple face with rosy cheeks.

Below you can see my sketch page surrounded by inspiration, with some practice sketches and in the middle of my sketch page is a little character that started developing.

At this stage I'm still not quite happy. She isn't quite my own yet. So I kept on. Here are some ore rough drawings.

it was at this point that I felt the nose and eyebrow were right and the little cheeks, but my character still needed some fine tuning. Kept on experimenting with hair and faces and her little body and clothing will develop later on. A lot of people name their character of course, now this is the super hard bit. I think as I develop a sound understanding of how she is drawn her name will just appear.

 Ill keep working on her tomorrow and show you the end result of my new character in my journal as soon as I'm finished altering her. She still needs a full body to work on and a clothing range. I want to try and keep it all as whimsical as I can. I think I need to also work on a mood board for her. Basically a mood board is her face done over and over with different expressions such as, happy, sad, angry, etc.

Well this sure has been fun. If you have developed your own little character I would love to see, so let me know!

Bye for now,

Sonya

Handmade Art Journal Cover

Good Afternoon to you!
Ive been working my little heart out lately, trying to get my next round robin art journal ready. The theme for this one is Fairies and doodles - From the Fairy Dreams course by Adriana Almanza.
As I posted on Thursday, I really loved a journal i recieved to do art in. The way it was painted with texture, the artwork on the front and most of all i loved the fancy yarn that tied the paper signatures into place.
SO, as you've probably guessed, I decided to do my journal in a similar style.
First of all I found an old childrens board book with a wide spine and tore the pages out.(You could also use just a normal thick cardboard)  Next I prepped the cover inside and out by using sandpaper to rough it up a bit,
I then applied a layer of thick kitchen paper towel. I adhered it to the cover inside and out with Mod Podge. It was looking lke this

After that was completely dried over night, then came the fun part! I painted it in acrylic paint and added some "Fairy dust" for some extra magic.

My journal needed some of my artwork on the front so I decided to use my Aquamarkers to make this lovely fairy. Again Mod Podge to stick it down.

While this was all drying, I made my watercolour paper signatures to go inside the journal and cut my fancy yarn to length. I use the yarn to tie in the pages instead of sewing them in place. It works really well and you can get them quite tight plus it looks awesome! Add  some dangling beads and Im all done. I so loved making this cover and I know its the start of a whole new crafty direction for me.