The Park Royal Project
For this Project we worked with the children from local schools, they entered a contest designing characters and creatures based on the idea of a creature responsible for something happening. Like a little man who comes and paints the bruises onto you after a fall or a shockingly large number of pencil thieves. Once they were sent in we each picked 2-3 at random and redrew them as finished illustrations to be printed on bookmarks and given to the children.
The whole exercise was an interesting challenge as we had to interpret children's drawings into illustrations that would appeal to 9-11 year olds and to make sure it was something that the child who made the initial design would be happy with, keeping in mind children are very exacting and honest in their judgement.
I took on 3 characters to draw, a money eating dinosaur, a cake stealing cat and a banana with a habit of curling things.
The first image I tackled was this one by Nancy of a cat and a cotton candy fluff (or a brain?) in capes and part hats eating cake. Their names and Twinkle and Fluff. I looked at some examples of animal characters stood up like people before drawing Twinkle to make sure they would look pleasant and not uncanny, I took a look at Beatrix Potter specifically and the animal children in Over the garden wall. I drew the colours from the origional drawing but saturated them and tweaked them towards the purple, teal and gold categories to keep it harmonious. I wanted it to not just be a plain redraw though so I added some cakes and confetti in the background. I'm especially pleased with the posing, I think I kept it close and made it easy to see what they are doing.
The next I attempted was Curle the Banana who curls things by Ante(I think, I can't read well). He's a simple banana character with a large bottle of a potion labelled 'Uncurle Potion'. I was a little confused as to if it was there for scale, as a nemesis or if he has it because he has a habit of getting carried away and needs a way to fix the things he curls up but either way I decided to draw it. I went with the design that had a star shaped top and gave him a little attitude and made sure to render everything nicely and add examples of things he has curled. The colours in the original drawing were lovely so I used them. Overall I'm happy with the result but, as a classmate so kindly pointed out to me, the shape of the final drawing might come off as a little explicit to some but I decided accuracy to the drawing mattered and that such connotations are almost unavoidable with a banana.
The last illustration was tricky as I'd never drawn a dinosaur before and had to keep it looking cool but not overly scary. Luckily Aarav had made a very cool colour scheme for this drawing with the bright pink piggy banks and Goldtooth (the dinosaur) was given a tongue of the same colour, with the green and gold it made a very bright and fun image. I looked up some pictures from dinosaur education books aimed at teenagers and of course drew inspiration from a T-rex. Pounder was a simpler character but I made sure they had a strong pose and stood out with the darkest spot in the drawing being their arms and details on the face to make sure even at a small size it would be clear that the little coin person was there. I definitely made sure the composition of this image was strong as the moment I got this character assigned I imagined Goldtooth stood surrounded by debris with the long tail curling in front to lead the eye.