Character Design Sketches

I’ve been pretty swamped with freelance work, but here’s a peek into one of my current projects. It’s a children’s book for Scholastic. I was asked to totally re-design an existing character, a young boy shark. Here are a few of the exploratory sketches I did that led up to the final design on the right. This one is a bit of a challenge because the shark has to be able to stand upright like a person, but also swim horizontally like a real shark. Also, since the shark is a lemon shark, I thought it might be fun to give him lemon-ish colors. But ultimately the client asked me to use the same colors from the previous artist’s design.

I’ll be finishing up the book in a couple of weeks and will let you know when it is available for sale.