Hello and happy May everyone!🌼
Let’s dive right back into where we left off in our 5 part series: Drawing a Children’s Book Illustration From Beginning to End. If you haven’t had the chance to read the last few posts, you can find the first post here, second post here, and third post here!
In the last post, we talked about giving our sketch dimension and adding more detail. In this post, we are going to talk about finalizing our sketch and getting it all ready for us to bring it to life with color!
The first detail that I’m going to add is going to be some facial features on my character. The features that we give our character are going to create their emotion, and show emotion in our scene.
Facial features give our character and illustration emotion.
Each of the faces below are the exact same face- but in each, the eyebrows are turned in different directions creating a different emotion. With out the eyebrows moved, our character looks lifeless. Eyebrows are one of the key factors in portraying emotion in our character.
The second feature that makes our character have emotion is the mouth. We can add/change the emotion with the mouth gesture that our character is making. The mouth gesture makes the emotion look much more dramatic and it comes across much clearer.
Let’s mess around with these faces on our sketch, keeping in mind the color pallet and mood that we have chosen for this illustration.
I think that number 1 is going to match the character best considering my vision for this picture. I can picture the story in my head now, based on this expression. Maybe she heard a noise and went to see what it was. Or she was out on a late night walk and saw something strange.
She looks curious and maybe even a bit spooked. Now our character has an expression and our illustration’s story feels complete.
This is our last chance to look over our sketch before we color it. Look at your sketch with a critical eye and make sure it’s how you want it.
In the next post, we will wrap up our series with bringing our illustration to life through color!
Thanks for reading!
~Eliyah
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