For one of my summer projects from uni I am to create design some characters and draw them using techniques of differen artists. These are some sketches towards a character using Shirley Hughes's techniques, at this point I have been working with just a few of her techniques to create some designs like these but I will introduce more of her techniques and materials (such as gouache and the way she uses line) once I've decided on a final design for the character. It's too fun drawing these children to pick one to move on.
I had picked out a list of artists I wish to look at during this project and Dave McKean was not one of them but I was watching the film MirrorMask the other day which features many of his drawings and afterwards I wanted to draw some scratchy strange characters with dip pen and ink, so I did. I'm not sure whether I will use the characters in the final character designs, I thought it might be interesting to try and tie them in with other artists I'd planned on using and to try to render them in a more realistic way but we'll see. The first character would be a librarian and the second would be an inspector.
I'd picked out several professions and personality traits to help create a range of characters, one of the professions was fisherman/woman which is the most recent I have been working on, these are a few thumbnails trying to work out her shape:
