I have spent some time developing the characters for the story over the last week or so. Through lots of sketching, I have come to a rough idea as to how the general shape of the characters could look. One thing I have been having trouble deciding is whether it is necessary or not to include a body as opposed to simply a head..? I can't seem to figure out a way of drawing a body that compliments the shapes found in the head. I think what will be useful in this situation is Fridays crit. I should hopefully be able to receive some feedback that will inform which direction I should go with the characters.
In terms of further development, I need to figure out how each specific character for each country will look. I'd like to keep the overall shapes in the characters rather consistent throughout the story. The reason for this being that I think it will compliment the overall theme of the story in that, world over, we all have more similarities than differences. This is an important element of the story. Subtle differences that may represent culture/customs/etc can be introduced through different applications of colour, tone and texture in each of the characters - but in unconventional ways.
Here are a few scans of some of the most important pages in the development of the character ideas that I've come to so far:
Going forward, I hope to get some critical feedback from the crit that will help me with further progression in the character designs. And I also need to start getting visual ideas for the scenery/background of the spreads. I plan to start this by creating loads of thumbnail ideas, this should help me to quickly build up a wealth of possible layouts.
