Making of Mondays: Outfit Sketches

Every time I work on a project, I try to remember the failures of the past.  I have a tendency to rush because I love what I'm creating.  This time, I'm trying to take the project in manageable chunks, take some time to look & analyze, then continue.

There are some things I'll be changing about these paper dolls as I progress.  I realized that the ears on the oldest girl doll are way off.  One is much higher than the other so I need to fix that.  I also realized that the base outfits I gave all of the dolls just don't work, so I'll change that a bit, too.

This is a work in progress and these are usually not images or thoughts I would share.  But process is really important to me.  I've seen this joke floating around the internet that really resonates with me: it's a page from a drawing book where step 1 is a set of circles or ovals or whatever and then step 2 is a photorealistic drawing of a bear or something.  I'm interesting in the in-between steps & if that means sharing the failures, then so be it.

These are my sketches.  It's not everything but it's a start.

I found that one of the best things for me is to print out my outlines in a color (blue or magenta or whatever) and draw directly on these templates.  For this project, I'm printing the templates out on 8.5in by 14in paper.  Why? Because I accidentally bought a ton of it and want to use it up!

Here's my Photoshop file.  I printed directly from this. Then, I'll draw on this sheet, scan it, fit it, and outline it in Photoshop.  It's a lot of paper to computer to scanner to computer and repeat as needed! Because I chose bright colors for the lines, I can selectively get rid of them in Photoshop after scanning and have just the black of my pencil lines.

I decided that the first thing to do is check the fit of the new base costume.  That's the image here. I set the sketch to Multiple so I can see it over the doll.  I like how it fits & I can outline it anytime.  The next thing I want to do is take a sampling of the outfit sketches and create a rough page layout.

When I layout a page, I give myself a half inch margin. It's larger than I need to print on a standard home printer or for publishing a book.  I do this so that I don't have to rework a book for something easy to avoid in the first place (which I've had to do and I'm not proud of it!).

To create an experimental layout, I opened up my back cover file.  I added approximately half inch margin guides.  Then, I opened up several sketch files, copy & pasted outfits, and arranged them on the sheet.  The goal of this experiment was to see if I could fit all of the similar themed outfits for each kid on one page.  In this case, I chose my raincoats sets.  These are some of the largest sketches so far & this will give me some upper limits to work with.

At this point in the project I've learned a few valuable things:
1) I still need to edit & refine the base dolls.  That's ok, because I don't have a ton of work put into the outfits, layout, etc.  Better to discover this early.
2) I can proceed with the idea of having page themes for each doll.  The experimental layout confirmed this for me.
3) I have about half of the outfits I need for the book.  That means more drawing.  I need to decide if I want this to be completely mix & match or if I want some one-piece outfit sets as well.

For now, it's back to Pinterest for inspiration and more drawing!