Creating the Characters for The Adventures of Wembly

This part of the book creation process was very enjoyable. Before this process, Wembly and his family of characters were just an idea in my mind, a shell of themselves written on paper and on the computer screen. After this process, I was able to see for the first time what my vision for the character looks like and it was so incredible. What a gift it was to be teaming up with such a great illustrator to help me realize this vision.

It all starts with an idea, that idea turns into a story and that story transforms into a world with fantastic characters and the only thing left to do is to catapult them into another realm of reality in the form of illustrations. But to do this, I needed to take my vision and put it into words to assist my illustrator in her work. To do that, it began with my project brief.

Project Brief

Once I decided on who my illustrator was and signed the contract / agreement for our business relationship, it was time to share with her my manuscript so she could begin her work of creating the illustrations for my story. Sometimes being new, you don’t know what you don’t know and I didn’t know a lot about this who illustration process. But, I was excited to learn.

Even though I didn’t know much about the illustration process, I did know a lot about my characters and the story. So, I decided to leverage that knowledge in service of helping my illustrator capture the mood, energy, and vision I had for not only the story, but for each character. To help, I created what I like to call a Project Brief. In this, my illustrator found the working title of the book, details about the project itself like story synopsis, target audience, deliverables about the book layout, and even a variety of images that help to capture the look I am going for.

Character Descriptions

Because it was important to get the illustrations for each character done to my standards, I thought it useful to share a brief description of each of the characters in the story with accompanying images to highlight what I was thinking about each character and how I see them looking. The Character Descriptions went a long way to help my illustrator gain a further idea of my vision for Wembly and his supporting cast of character. Additionally, in talking with her, we came to an understanding that I was NOT looking for a perfect replica of the live versions to the illustration. I wanted the essence of what these images show. Fortunately for me, she somehow understood what I was talking about and delivered fantastic character illustrations!!

Approving the Character Sketches

So, now my illustrator had all the resources that she would need to take a first past at the characters. In addition to the information she gained from a direct conversation with me, she had the manuscript of the story itself, a project brief laying out the details and vision of the characters and timeline for the project, along with specific descriptions to go into further detail about each of the characters. She was ready and the next step was to share with me the sketches of each character based on all that information.

Finalizing the Characters

Once I received my sketches with several options to choose from for each character, it was time to provide feedback and create the final versions of what each character will look like in the story itself. Once this step was complete, we could then move on to actually creating the illustrated storyboard for the story. This is such a fun time seeing what each character will ultimately look like.

*Note: Wembly had about 7 different version that we narrowed down to the two you see above) .