Nana character design for new book dummy project
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@smceccarelli FANTASTIC!!!!!!!!!! Love your style! Do you take these renderings and directly paint over your pencil strokes via photoshop or digital? Just curious because this is something I'm battling with moving to Photoshop and I do everything in pencil before I scan or snap a photo with my phone. These are beautiful, great work. Best of wishes to this you on this project.
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@smceccarelli These are great. I'm really drawn to the balcony and the tea party. Beautiful work!
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@smceccarelli I know i already commented but i just keep coming back and looking at these drawings - love everything about them!!!
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@Tyson-Ranes I work only digitally since 3-4 years now. So these are already in Photoshop and I just go on from here with additional layers (below and above the line) for the color.
I do draw with pencil now-and-then and still have paper sketchbooks, but after scanning (or photographing), I re-draw with digital pencil anyhow.Thank you for your great feedback!
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Wonderful composition on the tea party! wow!
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So cute, I love your gestures
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These are wonderful! Your character design is really great. I love the personality that you're able to breathe into each image. It was cool to see all of your exploration as well! I was a fan of Grandma #3, personally. She seems so cranky. I love it. Her story would have been totally different.
portfolio: moniquecucchi.com
instagram.com/crookedandbeautiful
shop: crookedandbeautiful.com -
@mcucchi Thank you! Yes, every nana would deserve a different story...and even for this one the story is not set in stone yet!
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This is awesome!! Love it
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I really liked number 6, but when i see what you have done so far, she is just perfect!
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I like #4. That smile.
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#2 mixed with the cheeky personality of #4.
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These are very well done!
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These are lovely! I instantly care about Nana and am a little sad about how it appears the story will end! Nicely done.
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The first finished (?) illustration. I need a couple of days distance, and any feedback or improvement suggestions in this time would be highly welcome! I always think the drawings look better than the finished illustrations...but I do not think I see things objectively after 20 hours painting....
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Oh that is gorgeous. It truly is... I really love the pink/green colour scheme, it's really striking and I think just the right choice for this fantastical (heavenly?) story...it gives just the right level of grandma's closet/vintage green/fantastical journey sort of feelings (if that makes any sense!) Beautifully drawn, beautifully painted - don't change a thing! It is just perfect as it is. I really want to read the whole story - and buy the book!
EDIT - okay wait there is one thing
Nana and the two butlers, their faces are perfect...but the fourth face, the little girl more shaded in green - her eyes are like button eyes, stylised, whereas the other three have 'real', accurately drawn eyes. It might be better if the girl's eyes were more consistent with the others. But that is the only thing in a sea of wonderful painting.... -
Wow, such beautiful drawing and rendering. Really inspiring work!!!
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I think the painting looks amazing!
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@Dulcie Thank you very much Dulcie! Your opinion means a lot to me! Ah, the girl in the hat. I re-did her face three times already. At first it was a real lady with realistic feature. Then I wanted to have her as a doll (the tea-party alludes to the doll's tea parties Nana and Emma had, and the next spread is Emma having a tea party alone). But I agree with you it looks creepy and out-of-place: the proportions are not right. One idea that I had is to re-draw all characters apart from Nana as dolls or stuffed toys (including the butlers). I did a sketch like that, but the image of Nana with giant dolls and teddy bears looked like it belonged to a different story.
I think I will re-paint the lady in the hat as a doll-like real woman again, as you suggest and leave it at that (apart from correcting the other million mistakes that I see the day after, of course).
There are two manuscripts in discussion for this story, and this illustration may not fit at the end anyhow.One question I have is about Emma (the little girl at the front). The idea is that Emma would be present in all illustrations where Nana talks about her dream-like journey, but be almost a monochromatic sketch - not a real part of the scene. That would be inverted in the end, with Nana becoming monochromatic and "not really there" in scenes where Emma starts playing again. I was not sure I could pull it off in spreads (more confident in vignettes). What do you think?
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Ah, that makes sense (that at one point she was a doll)....when looking at it I did wonder, at one point, whether the girl was a doll - so that definitely came across! - but from the context, her size, etc, I thought that she could not be. I agree that it would be an easier read if she were 'real' like the other people in the scene.
Hmm, your idea to have both Emma and Gran present in all scenes and invert them at the end, with the colouring, will be a tricky thing to pull off. It is a very clever idea, and I like that, but I think it weakens the emotional part of the story in a way - because if Emma is present in every scene with Gran, why would Gran need to write a letter? And I think you need a distance between them, to cement the idea that even though Gran is far away, she is still out there, somewhere, and loves Emma very much.
I think you could present Emma in the story, as a main character, but I think you would need to have them in separate scenes, perhaps with them taking turns to write letters to each other...eg Emma could write something like 'I miss you. I've made the teddy bears picnic for you/got you some tea with your favourite rose-printed teacup'' and Gran replies that she'd love to but she's off on her latest adventure, etc. Then you would have a back and forth going throughout the book. This is obviously just one way out of many ways you could structure it. But that way it would give Emma a voice and a way to express her feelings about Gran not being there any more.
Full disclosure - I have about 6 ideas for picture book stories, and one of them was very similar in concept - I have a lot of colourful, slightly rebellious and interesting relatives and I always imagined that they would not let death stop them having adventures. So I had an idea for a granny-saying-goodbye type of book, talking about all the places she was going to visit on her way to the stars. It will probably never happen, and if it did it would certainly be different (as so many stories turn out to be defined by how they tell the story, not the story itself). I still have a few stories left which I haven't seen anywhere else yet, so those are top of my list, well ahead of the ones I'd have to re-work to be more 'different' to those I've seen already
So maybe I'm biased, but out of all the story ideas you've presented here so far - this one is my favourite and I think it looks very, very publishable!
