Protagonist Concepts

This is basically the idea I started with, I had the idea early on that I wanted the protagonist of the story to be male as soon as I had decided on the theme of the narrative. I think boys are generally seen as less sensitive, or sometimes this idea that boys shouldn't show their emotions is put upon them by our societal gender roles. Because of this I wanted the character to be male to go against this idea.

 

This is a sheet of concepts, because I had such a set idea about the age, gender and demeanor of the character I decided to start with thumbnail sketches rather than silhouettes as I thought that the basic shapes would be very similar so I wanted to focus on the details straight away. I decided during my concepts to go with an idea I'd had of setting the story in autumn. I decided I wanted the real world to look like the season of  autumn as it is a season of change plus I really like the idea of sticking to an autumnal colour palette. I want the world the boy visits in the story to look more like spring as it is the season which has connotations of rebirth and new life/ beginnings. I thought having this detail would help tell the story visually and really help get across the positive feeling I want to have at the end of the story.
Because the real world is in autumn I focused on designing warm coats and scarves etc.

This is the basic sketch of what came out of the thumbnails, I wanted him to look cute and kind of sad. I wanted to keep to a simple style but it turned out being a lot more sketchy than my original idea but I think I like it a lot more, it has a storybook illustration kind of feel so I think I may keep to this from now on.

Some colour try outs:

 I'm trying to keep in mind that for the beginning of the story the environments will mostly be oranges, browns and reds so I want to have colours in his clothes that will compliment this.