Continuing the quest for the kawaii

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Still trying to make my characters cuter. It ain’t easy…for me, at least. The formula seems to be big head, big eyes, rounded features, no straight lines, short noses. What i’m really missing is cute gestures!

Storyboarding and Cuteness

The two mystery mice have tagged along for this book.

I did it again. I was tidying up today’s post and accidentally deleted it. So now I’m going to shorten it and recreate the post in three terse paragraphs, which I should have done in the first place.

I’m implementing cuteness by shortening necks, enlarging eyes, making mouths and noses smaller, and arms legs shorter. Enough said.

This image is an example of my rough storyboarding. In the background there’s a more realistic sketch of a baby donkey, a foal. That sketch is just a note to myself. Baby donkeys are darling souls. I want to capture that feeling when I draw Bettina.

More Character Design for a Cute Butterfly

Today I spent my time working of making Buddy cuter. For one thing, he’s got too many legs — they clutter up the composition and he starts to look heavy instead of airy. I’m thinking of humanizing him the same as the other characters, with clothes, arms and legs. When he needs his wings, they’ll magically appear and become huge enough to carry a burro over a wall. The main consideration is making all of this anthropomorphic behavior believable.

Here are some of today’s sketches. Drawing “cute” is harder than I thought it would be.

Resubmitting My Children's Picture Book to Ingramspark

This morning I uploaded my corrected PDF to Ingramspark. It passed the initial inspection and now I’m waiting for the results of the second inspection.

I’m going to have cuter characters in the second book. Drawing cute means bigger heads, shorter noses, skinny or chubby bodies, and softened features. Here are some initial ideas for Jimmy Jay and Buddy Butterfly as they will appear in my next, cuter book, which has a working title of The Butterfly Who Flew 2,000 Miles to Find His Family. I just made that name up this instant.