Let's create some characters

Week 1 progress of my dummy children's book for my portfolio

Feb 18, 2025

Hello! I hope you all have had a good week!

This week I’m chatting about all things character development. I am currently illustrating a book dummy for my portfolio and all week I have been designing and building out the main characters of the story. I thought it would be good to summarise how I went about it and what I have learnt.

First I tried to learn about my characters

There are two main characters in the story, a little girl Cheese and a little boy Pickle. My first task was to read through the text and try and determine key characteristics for each including:

Personality
Appearance
Props
Poses
Expressions

Once I had these noted down I was then able to move on to the second stage.

Research what cheese and pickles look like

Everyone naturally has an image of a cheese and pickle in their mind when they think of the two food items. However, I didn’t want to just rely on my imagination on this. I wanted to create a process and practice that I could use for all my illustrations. Therefore I went out and explored the food aisles of my local supermarket as well as Google images for all the cheese and pickles images I could find. My initial aim was to create a mood board of images that I could use as an initial reference. I also realised that I wanted to see if I could find a cheese or pickle that fitted my characters’ personalities a bit better e.g. Cheese loves colour, therefore should she be a cheese that has a coloured wax covering or be a cheese that has some other flavours infused in it.

This was a relatively fun challenge although for someone who doesn’t actually like cheese, being surrounded by cheese was not my favourite pastime!

Start sketching while mapping out shapes

A huge part of character design is the shape of your character. Maybe I have spent too much time researching character design for animation, but I love how shapes can play a role in the personality of your character i.e. circles, squares and triangles. I could talk about it for hours and maybe one day I’ll write a post about what I have learnt specifically on this. With Cheese and Pickle, I wanted to see if I could incorporate some of this shape theory to match their personalities while also keeping in tune that they needed to look like a recognisable cheese and pickle to young children.

I dedicated a sketchbook page to a shape and then filled each shape with the different cheese or pickle types I was contemplating.

For Cheese, my main focus was to find a shape that fitted her more shy and reserved personality. I wanted her to have a rounder or more square shape. For Pickle, I wanted to showcase how he is more outgoing and confident than Cheese. That meant he would be more rectangle or triangle-focused. I also debated whether he should be a whole pickle or whether he should be a slice of pickle or a pickled onion. There were so many choices!

Shortlisting my favourites

After drawing many, many pages in my sketchbook of cheese and pickles, I decided to shortlist my favourites out of the ones I had done so far.

My criteria for my shortlist was the following:

Do they look like recognisable cheese and pickles for the audience?
Does their shape or texture show part of their personality?

In the end, I settled on my two favourites, however, the fun didn’t stop there as I wanted to add in some props for them to enhance their personality even more!

Adding in some props!

Props are a great way to showcase a character’s personality. I wanted to give my Cheese and Pickle some to make it easier to relate to some of their loves.

With Cheese I wanted her to have a bag and some shoes. She loves colour and shopping so she needed a bag for all her shopping purchases that was as colourful as possible. I didn’t want the whole bag to be full rainbow but I did add in a rainbow decal. The shoes I wanted to continue that idea.

With Pickle, my focus was on his shoes. He’s a confident little chap and not scared of much, so I wanted his shoes to have some scuffs where he had jumped right into playing without the consequences of the state of his shoes!

Time to add some colour

This was one of the easiest parts of the development as cheese and pickles have quite distinctive stereotypical colours i.e. yellow and green. I wanted to keep this to make sure that for a young audience, they were super recognisable. The only thing I needed to consider colour palette-wise was how bright I wanted to make them and also any other extra accent colours I wanted to make. I’ve decided that I want to use coloured pencil and soft pastel to illustrate this book dummy so I headed back to my sketchbook to make some swatches.

Final thoughts…

This is my final Cheese and Pickle. Hopefully, they look readable enough to the audience and also showcase a little bit of their personality! Now that I have them ready, I have two tasks to work on. The first is the most fun part of character development in my opinion which is drawing out how they would interact with each other. I am now working on seeing how my little Cheese and Pickle would express themselves not only on their own but also with each other. This is important as they are best friends!

After that my focus will be on the composition of the spreads and the flow of the narrative!

I would love to hear how any of you try and tackle character development! I find it so interesting. If any of you want to know how next week’s progress goes on composition and you haven’t subscribed already, please consider clicking the subscribe button below. It is completely free to do so!

Until next time!

Em x