In March, the Society of Visual Storytelling (SVS) held a contest for a design sheet for a fairy tale traveler. The prompt read as follows:
Your assignment is to design a Fairy-Tale Traveler. Your character is young, naive, but resilient and stouthearted! Their quiet village is hidden away in a secluded valley, but is in grave danger. A horde of goblins have promised to raid the village when the harvest moon rises. Our young traveler is on a quest to find someone, anyone, powerful enough to fight back the horde and save their village from destruction. What we want from you is a character design sheet with your own take on the traveler. They could be a halfling, elf, human, or animal. Just make them appealing and interesting. Every entry must have 5 color drawings on ONE page: 1 neutral pose front, 3/4 view 1 neutral post back, 3/4 view 1 walking or running pose 1 sitting pose (ground or chair) 1 close up of face
It took me awhile to get started. I wanted to plan and complete the challenge using ProCreate. Completing the image 100% digitally though proved difficult for me. I tried for a couple weeks, pressing on with very limited results. I pulled references, I ideated, and even wrote out traits and characteristics for the character. I just could not get going.
So I took my ideas analog and sketched in my sketchbook. It felt more natural and what I was seeing in my head started to get translated.
I then imported my drawings into ProCreate and was able to stitch together the design sheet poses. After laying it all out, It was smoother to start editing and inking my sketches.
After it was all inked, I got some color selection help from my daughter. We found this great color palette on Pinterest and it even came with hexcodes.
After I finished up coloring, I added a texture to the background and hit submit. Here are the other entries: http://cshellmedia.com/clients/svs/.
Endnotes: Overall I'm happy with how Nena turned out. She's the most complete work I've put together in quite some time. I do need better time management for the contest. This image was pulled together at the last moment. The image could use more shading and the inking could use better line weight variation. Plus,the silhouette could have been more dynamic.