Children's book

This is a concept page for Ayana and I's children's book. The STEM topic is the physics of flying following the story of a young 10 year old girl who lives of on a floating house....literally. The things is the girl starts to wonder how her house is even up in the sky; what is flying really? How does it work? This pushes her to attempt to fly herself trying to learn from the birds she admires and plays around with. As a kid her ideas are a bit weird (cardboard wings guys), forcing her to learn and adapt ideas until she can find the right idea.

Artist Research

When looking for portraits, this one really caught my eye. I loved this guy's expressions, to the contrasting background, to the letters literally spilling from his mouth. The letters make a movement you can follow to the book. It also makes you think about it's implications like the saying, "I know the word, it's on the tip of my tongue".

Yummei

Yummei is one of the newer artist I follow on both Deviantart and Tumblr. When I see her art my eyes instantly get caught on her choice of color pallet  She knows just how to mix her colors together to make this eye gripping picture with some amazing contrast (in my opion it also gives the piece good unity as well). Her proportions are well made whether she's doing simple faces for perspective/bird's eye view.

Sakimichan

Sakimichan is another popular Deviantart artist and for good reasons. Her use of contrasting colors between backgrounds and foregrounds makes her characters really stick out (along with being beautifully done of course). Her use of shading and line art give way to this really cool gray area of style and realism and (as you can see and the bottom mermaid painting) she can use her art to give movement and flow that just let your eyes follow the picture.

Junichi, Clockwork Ronin

Finished with the finished and finalized design for Junichi.

Her story is set in the steampunk universe where humanity has taken a new turn to steam powered electronics with iconic clockwork and armor fashion. Junichi (ironically meaning "obidient one") is a Onna-Bugeisha- in simple words a female samurai. After disrepecting her master though, she ends up getting demoted (or upgraded depending on how you look at it) to ronin. A ronin is a masterless samurai that either got that way from lossing their master in combat to being "disowned" in a way. Now she has to wander through this steampunk universe by herself while still trying to live up to her samurai ideals.

Early designs of her mostly focusing on gas masks and head gear. It was hard trying to decide how traditional I should go with the whole design concentrating on the fact that she can't be absolutely traditional samurai plus she's also a ronin so her style would vary differently from person to person.

After choosing an outfit and face I like, I worked on the color scheme. With her Asian heritage it's easy to see Junichi with black hair and brown eyes so no worry there. I had to work in a bunch of browns and rust yellow into the armor since Steampunk is know for a more brown/muddy color steams having to deal with lots of metal and dirt.

Finished Design of Junichi sans her goggles and mask (I shall be adding that in shortly). In original Onna-Bugeisha's they were a thin chest plate that I translated into a very loose corset( steampunk women are practically know for their corsets) and ended up using more traditional armor for her shoulder pads and waist  .

September Character Progress

Tutorials for my learning pleasure