Character developing

For the past few years I have been working on outlining a plotline that I originally intended to be a novel however more and more I'm thinking it could work as a graphic novel. Recently I've just being playing around with the idea. I've taken out a few books, the best one I've looked at yet is This One Summer (pictured below). I loved how it stuck to a really simple palette to tell a story. 

As far as creating my own characters, I've stuck to playing around with aesthetics and how a superhero crime fighter would move (yes it did involve watching some martial arts videos and a binge watching of batman films). 

Most of it's been donein biro, just for rough rather than spending ages on something at this stage, this week I used ink for the first time ever which I got pretty excited over, I really felt like it worked for my character. 

Size does matter

I was nearly done with my mask when I got stuck, Should I draw lines or dots to show that it was tea pouring out of the kettle not just some mysterious liquid? Rather than ruin a mask I'd spent the afternoon making I decided to make some mini me's to stick on my fingers to help my decide whether to go for dots or lines.

As I was asking around for people's opinions, Matt pointed out to me that actually it did come across a lot better being smaller. I played around making a few more mini me's before deciding that actually they were much cuter and more individual as tiny masks and decided that these would be in my final photos. 

(Tea) Leafing it out

After the initial ideas I picked the two I liked best and thought I could work with easiest, Teapot and House (house partially pictured here). I made sure as I was mapping out a more considered version of the mask, including annotations of what I wanted it to look like. 

Once decided I then began to utilise the materials, trying with different coloured card (red and blue, purple and yellow) until I came to one I liked (blue on blue). 

I then experimented with different strengths of card to see what held up the pot the best. I then covered the card with brown paper bag to disguise it as "tea" pouring out. 

Next was how to make it stick to my face! I felt like string was flimsy and the mask was pretty weighty up top. I played around with the idea of masquerade masks and the idea of a stick but it just didn't seem to fit in as well. I decided on a good old around the head card strap and then proceeded to have a go at making it adjustable (this worked for some people I tried it on who had smaller heads than me). 

initial mask ideas

These are my first initial responses to the brief, I tried to keep them as simple as I could whilst also making sure that I was considering the materials available. I gave them names so that I could set them in a theme easier (and also who doesn't love naming things?).

I drew outlines of faces so I knew where the mask would sit on the face, I wanted something that came off the face or interacted with mask (see moonface and teapot ) so people would engage with it more. I kept it to simple fineliners for initial planning.