Warming up...

Below are a series of sketches that I did to loosen up in preparation of redesigning the characters and style of my book. It's mostly a mish mash of hybrid animals, weird shapes and cute, patterned creatures.
The Takers themselves though, are monsters, and should be reflected as such. They need to be fantastical and insane and wonderful to look at, since they're the ones getting all of the coverage in the book. I've got quite a lot of time to play around with character design anyway so there will probably be a few pages like this in the coming weeks.
I also think that I'll be working with scanned pencil images and using very light, but bright, colours. Or perhaps barely any colours at all. I want more white in my book. I loved it in Wolf Won't Bite by Emily Gravett.
Also, some of the looser, sketchier images on this page work better, but I'm finding it really hard to work that way. I instinctively want to refine sketches and make characters three dimensional so that they can exist in a logical, though fantastical world. This really isn't necessary. I've got a tutorial tomorrow too, so if I can throw out a lot of designs in the meantime then maybe tomorrow we'll have a better idea of where we're going right or wrong. These characters were drawn on an a2 piece of paper with an HB pencil.