15 Jul 2022, 05:49

@ArtMelC Great work! Your rendering style is nicely-textured and overall appealing and definitely kid-friendly.

I'll answer the easier questions first, as most of the issues revolve around no. 2.

  1. Yes, your character is recognisable across poses
  2. This is the "but" continuation to 1. But, I'm not getting a super strong feel for the personality of your character from this character sheet alone, aside from very generic kid traits, like "likes to play" and possibly is a bit "curious". It may not be a big deal though, since a fair number of children's book I see on the market (especially the SG one 😹 ) don't seem to feature very strong or well-developed character designs and it's mostly the story that carries things through. But a well-developed character never hurts.
    I guess it's up to you to decide whether or not it's helpful for you to further develop your character through this sheet or through sketching him in more poses with different props to bring out his unique trait(s), or you could jump straight into the story and the draw the character in your story scenes to get a feel for him.
    If you haven't already taken it, I think the SVS foundational character design class was helpful for me to be more deliberate and systematic in designing my characters.

For no. 2 I've done draw-overs and a detailed critique on the picture below. My comments are marked as either technical issues (meaning there's a pretty objective technical problem) vs suggestions (which is my more subjective take that I feel would help to enhance the piece, but since it's subjective and you know your own story and character best, you can take it or leave it).

07-15-khai-mel-critique.png

One extra thing beyond the comments in the pic above, is that you might want to try out drawing lots of simplified heads at different angles to really get comfortable with drawing your character from different perspectives. Just a circle/oval with cross hairs to mark the centreline and brow-line are enough to convey the basic angle of the face, and you'll find it much easier to draw faces in all sorts of non-standard perspectives like extreme top-down or bottom-up views. (See the Basic Heads in Diff Angles drawings in the pic)

I hope this helps and all the best with your books! Keep us updated on your work 😃💪