Mirka Hokkanen

Character Design for Picture Books, Part 1

Hi Lula, you've done so much work! Amazing job! Congratulations! I love the character lineup. Everyone is very cute and I love the attitude with the cat.  I wonder if there is a way to make the grandpa and grandma look a bit different? they have very similar seed-like shape.  The turnip is huge, and that makes this version of the story even more fun, to see the characters so tiny against the leaves.  When you are working with color on the spreads, make sure your characters are visible from the background. You have them very similar values on both spreads, and it is a bit hard to see the characters. I would make grass on the top colored piece lighter, so grandpa stands out, and then with turnip pulled out, the cat and dog are lost in the turnip. The dog also looks a lot like a rabbit when the ears are up, and we can't see a tail, so I would make sure that we can tell it's a dog in each scene.  The second big thing I see is that the character sizes should be the same compared to each other. In the bottom right corner, colored illustration, the cat and the dog are larger than the grandma and grandpa, so keep working on making sure you draw your characters consistently to themselves and compared to each other for each illustration.  Tip for layout: as you are working on spreads, think of interesting places to put text, not always on the top, and also as a general rule for picture books, there usually isn't a ton of text per page. The top colored illustration is ok, but the bottom colored on has too much text. I would cut the text in half, and place the rest of it on other pages.  So as a recap:  consistency, and contrast would be the first place where I would start reworking these illustrations. And then think about text placement creatively.

Hi Mirka I love a devolution about my work and what to improve. Thanks so much

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