The Girl Who Moved With Sunshine – Process Blog 2

I’ve been making steady progress on The Girl Who Moved With Sunshine. A couple of days of solid painting hours have been very fruitful. Oliver’s character design is beginning to take shape, and I’m starting to think about backgrounds (gasp!) and colour (omg!).

I think I’m starting to get the hang of him here. Although I’m still struggling to draw him the same way across multiple sketch sessions.

I feel that it’s very important for this story that it has a setting. It needs to be based somewhere real. Partly because the dialogue is so poetic, but also because I feel that backgrounds will help me to tell a better story and will help me say more about the characters. When I’ve limited myself to so few words and only two characters, something else needs to step up and fill the space. Finally, finally, it’s time for scenery.

I started a couple of small paintings of Tenki and Oliver on different parts of Wellington’s waterfront. If I was unsure before, I definitely know that the story is set here now. I’ve been working my illustrations from photographs of locations. This technique does mean I’ve got a bit of legwork in my future to collect some more backgrounds, but that’s all a part of the fun.

One of the important locations in the book is Oliver’s flat. I’m playing around with how it might work at the moment, but I expect it to evolve quite a bit as I do some more research into it. I can’t base his flat off my own, because I don’t think this is somewhere my characters would inhabit.

I’ve been playing with watercolour, and while I love it I am still not sure it’s the right feel for the project. I haven’t found my colours yet, but I’m having a lot of fun trying to find out.

I want to share the draft script, but to be honest it sounds better when it’s read aloud than when it’s written down. I am partway tempted to read it and record it for youtube or similar. I’ll decide by the next post…