Family proportions.

I was VERY concerned that I kept drawing the children too old. It's hard to be consistant. Feedback from Stephanie was that I was adding 3 years to Luke and Emily, and I was making the littlest boy too much of a baby. So she took some photos of families from church to show me the relative sizes. Then I drew a version of our book family. I scanned it in and used photoshop to adjust their proportions, mainly leg length.

Mum   Ben   Emily   Luke   Dad

From this, I made some coloured rulers in InDesign, so that when I was putting my drawings into the layout I could also check if the relative heights were correct. And then I also had to constantly remember to make Luke and Emily's legs and arms short, so that they looked little. Fat tummies also make kids look young! A few years older and they get much lankier.

I put the least amount of practise into the Dad. He's supposed to be a skinnyish man getting slouchy and parenty. He doesn't show up at all in one book, so thats OK, but in another book he is all the way through, and unfortunately he varies in quality. His face changes shape, his height varies. I really didn't get the hang of him at all. Even in this sketch I can tell that I don't really understand his body because he's straight like a pole and is falling backwards slightly.

So this drawing is pretty much how they look in the books. The end size of the books meant that the drawings are quite small, so the simpler illustration style of this sketch is basically how I ended up drawing the finished scenes. All my lead-up was too detailed and too big. Drawing it smaller like this forced me to simplify, especially the faces: just dots and spots. I find the hardest part of the face to draw is the bit between the nose and the top lip, so at this size I don't have to draw it at all!