OUIL603 Extended Practice - Engineer's Colouring Book, Part 5

 After we did the first round of colouring book pages, Kerry printed some initial testing copies and took them out into primary schools to test how well received they were/if their message was clear. The books went down a storm, apparently - and the teachers, parents and students all loved them.

However - one of the key parts of feedback that were given about them were that there wasn't enough diversity amongst the characters, and that we needed to include more minority representations in the final book. So Kerry asked us to come up with 4 more designs, for another 4 sections of engineering to ensure the book had a more equal spread of representation.

I wanted to draw a boy from an afro-caribbean background, with different hair types. The category of engineering I'd chosen to draw for was Mechanical Engineering - so I wanted to draw him fighting as a superhero with mechanical toys (like planes, cars), growing up into a Mechanical Engineer designing machines. 

I liked both of these as a character designs but I thought the little boy with shorter hair worked better - and you could see his facial expressions a lot clearer. I also experimented with them wearing face coverings like masks and goggles for a ~true superhero~ feel, but I felt it complicated their designs and they didn't need it so I got rid of it for the final design.

This is what the characters looked like on the final, both as a child and grown up. I created this the same way I did the others - I drew an initial Berol pen 'blueprint', which I then used as a sketch to draw the Cintiq lines over the top. This has definitely allowed me to get the lines as crisp as I could get them - a marked improvement on my previous digital ink-work. 

Compositionally I made this the same as the other two - mixing my character designs with existing reference imagery to make it look as accurate as possible whilst remaining stylised. 

Using imagery as a reference for pose and perspective has been really useful for this colouring book brief, and it's definitely going to be a technique I use again later if I do any more digital character work with line-work. 

Kerry was happy with the extra designs we submitted, and took them to make a prototype. The next time we saw the books was at a Principal's meeting, where we had to talk about the project with the upper management!