Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Characters! by Fred Koehler

So... my 3-year-old daughter asked me to tell her a story last month and we spent the next hour rolling out a wonderful yarn about giants at the grocery store. The concept was simple, the story was sweet, and I was inspired, so I wrote it. I was hoping to have the finished concept illustration to share today, but I'm not quite ready to let it out the door. I will, however, share a little of my process in developing two of the characters for this story - giants named Puck and Pickle.

I started with really simple sketches - size, blocking, how they filled the space.

From there, I roughed out a concept.

Next came some color for the rough sketch.
Then I went back and studied the characters. Lots of sketches - some good, some terrible - all compared side by side. In this case, I wanted one with hair and one bald.
 I really did like the red-head, but in the end he didn't make the cut. 
Meet Puck and Pickle, or at least something pretty close to final concepts!

-Fred Koehler
fred @ somelikeitsmart.com


2 comments:

  1. Very cool Fred! Will be interested to see how the finished artwork comes out!

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  2. Wow, thanks so much for sharing your process for creating these great characters, Fred.

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