Wee Unicorn - Character Design

The weird thing about living in Scotland is that there are unicorns everywhere.  On flags, as statues, and on coats of arms, but after a while you stop noticing them.  They're our national animal.  Here are a few of the Inverness unicorns.

Before I wrote Wee Unicorn I hadn't given them a lot of thought.  And I'd unfairly been a little dismissive of them lately.  There seemed to be unicorns everywhere. 

Normally when I write a book I come up with the character first.  For Wee Unicorn I'd been discussing Scottish folklore ideas and creatures with my editor and so I didn't actually have a character yet.  The first challenge for me was to see if I could draw a unicorn (at all!) but, more importantly, one that felt like mine.

My immediate worry was that unicorns are horses, and wise illustrators know to avoid these because horses are hard to draw.  But all of my main characters are very young, they're the equivalent age of the child reading the book, so they're often small too.  Lesson one: small horses are easier to draw than tall ones.  Manes are harder to draw than you'd expect.  These are the first sketches I did. 

It's hard to describe what I'm looking for when I do these.  I'm obviously looking at things like face shape and proportion, trying to make the most appealing version I can, but I'm also looking for personality.  A drawing that is not just a drawing but that has a little bit of life in it: a character.  It's one of those know it when you see it sort of things.

You can see I'm experimenting with textures, the mane, the first inkling of a scarf, and I'm adding little bits of information that will eventually make up the story.  I don't really know anything about character design but I always draw mine in different moods and situations.  My character design always ends up being how I figure out what the book is about.

Here I've moved on to playing with colour and working out what a Wee Unicorn might actually do all day.  There were many things to consider.  Does my character use their hooves like hands?  Walk on hind legs?  I wanted her to be essentially horse-like, but that does limit what the character can do, especially one so small.  I kept hearing talk of unicorns being magic but it made no sense to me.  I didn't understand how they were magic, what their powers were or why.  Funnily enough, this became my way into the book.  I decided to write about a unicorn who was very small, loud and not magic, even though everyone expected her to be.  I wanted her everyday qualities, ones that were taken for granted, to be what was truly magical about her.  Once you know who your character is they are easier to write about.

Even though I'm experimenting with markings you can she's almost the Wee Unicorn from the book.

I knew my backgrounds were going to be very vibrant so I wasn't too worried about Wee Unicorn being pure white.  I thought she'd stand out nicely but I did want to give her a little something.  I thought a scarf would be a nice detail.  You get a lot of movement in a scarf if your character is running or the wind is blowing.  It's a nice pop of colour and it's cold in the highlands too.

I wanted to keep it traditional looking so I made my version of a Fair Isle knit.  I chose the crown as a motif because unicorns are seen with a crown around their necks on the coat of arms.  I wanted to add a little nod to that.

Wee Unicorn is published by Hachette Children's Books and is available to pre-order now.

Please support your local bookshop or an online indie if you can.

Here are a few places you can buy it CLICK HERE

Merry Christmas

 Wishing you a very merry christmas and a happy new year.

Christmas Shop

 My shop will be open until December 6th.

CLICK HERE TO ENTER THE SHOP

Due to ongoing postal disruption, and the dreaded Christmas post office queue, I'm going to shut up shop early this year.  But until then I still have plenty of Xmas gifts.

Christmas Knits 

Like this pack of 4 christmas mice cards CLICK HERE

I've also added some etchings all of which can be found by CLICKING HERE

An original gouache painting 

CLICK HERE for painting

I have blank notebooks to draw and write in.  Made from recycled materials.  

CLICK HERE for jotters

I have plenty of prints and things too.  Feel free to look around.  On December 6th my shop will shut and I'll eat biscuits.  Thank you for supporting small businesses.

Coming soon...

 This the cover of my next book, Wee Unicorn.  It's publishing in Feb 2023 with Hachette Children's Books.

It's a book set in a landscape very much like the Highlands where I live.  It's full of creatures from Scottish folklore, and it was a lot of fun to make.

You can read more about the book by clicking here 

Bluebell Woods

 

A sketch of my local woods in two colours.  It gets full of bluebells, hence the title, but none were present when I drew it.

Tiger process

This is a little tiger idea I've been thinking about.  My idea feels too simple so I thought making some of the images might help unlock it.  There's a quick breakdown of how I made the image below.

I was working on this image on Friday which is also #colour_collective day, and I like to join in from time to time.  Luckily, the colours were a perfect fit for my tiger (see below).  I like how unusual the purpley blue is but I do think the darker colour I settled on is a bit punchier.

My colour collective original

Lately I've been making artwork like I would prepare a screen print.  For every colour I make a separate black layer.  Imagine the black lines are where the colour will be and imagine that where the paper is white will be clear.  Completely see through.  It takes a minute to get your head around this.  I like to use paint because I'm not very practised with a brush and it allows a less controlled line.  That's why I like this whole process, and it means I spend less time at a computer.

I knew this was going to be a two colour image (a dark and an orange plus white) but I wasn't sure if the background would be too busy so I broke the trees into two separations to make it easier to delete one if I needed to.  And I wanted to test the tiger outline in both paint and pencil so I kept that apart from the background.  This is what everything looks like separately.

Trees and paint tiger stripes

Bamboo

Tiger outlines and fur tests

The top row is the tiger outline.  As much as I like my backgrounds to feel loose, I still like the control I have with a pencil for character outlines.  I've drawn it twice because I was testing a regular HB pencil (left) versus a softer colouring pencil line (right).  The second row is me testing the fur texture of the tiger.  Ultimately, I used the image on the right.  I placed this over the tiger and coloured everything outside of it black too.  This was going to be my orange layer.

If I lay them all over each other you can get an idea of what the image will look like.

All the separations placed over each other

I scan all of these into the computer and line them up on my page.  I spent some time deciding between the painted stripes and the pencil and edited the layers accordingly.

Once I've blocked in the basic colours it looks like this.

Dark layer

Orange

One layer over the other

I then spend some time editing the image, adding details like highlights, whiskers and fur lines, and I make the image more textured.  I have a selection of textures I've created that I delete from laters to make them look more worn.  I also decide on the final image to use a yellow layer over a red instead of one layer of orange.  That way I could delete parts of each colour and you'd see the red and yellow peek through.

The final image looks like this

It probably seems like a long way of doing things but I find the painting relaxing.  My previous Dream Cars post was made similarly except I drew all the colour layers digitally in Procreate, there was no painting.  That works well for me with vehicles and structured items but for more natural imagery I prefer to paint in a traditional way.

Dream Cars

One of my earliest memories of school is being in Primary 1 and drawing a car.  They told us to draw anything we wanted and I couldn't think of anything but the person next to me was drawing a car so I drew one too.  I don't think I've drawn a car since.  So this week I had a go.  

This is Jon, he wanted to be a fox, in his dream car (which is almost exactly my actual car but according to him it's not the same).

And this is me in my Nissan Figaro.  They're such cute little cars.

Both images were sketched in pencil first and then redrawn in in Procreate using my sketch as a guide. The textures and colours were finalised in Photoshop.  I'm still far more skilled and at home in photoshop but I do enjoy drawing on the Ipad.  It's great for blocking in shapes.