Emotional Ties: Character Ideas

I have decided on having four children in my animation with one adult, who tells the scary story. 

Character One will be an over excited boy called Ryan Russell, the adult telling the story will be his Dad, Rob Russell.

Character Two will be Connor Burt who keeps falling asleep and waking up

Character Three will be Ellie Hodgkins, she's a real girly girl 

And Character Four will be Jess Cooley who is a tom boy who likes to try and act tough. 

I will be writing full descriptions etc of these characters later but I felt that before I do that I need to create them visually so I can really get a feel for these characters. I decided to create some opposite personalities with the characters to compliment each other and make the animation that bit more interesting through how they interact with each other. 

The main story to this is that the four children are quite close friends and Ryan's Dad has taken them out on a little camping trip together. On the first day they are all tired from travelling and setting up camp and so when the sun has gone down they settle down round the camp fire for a story...

I decided to start on the first character, Ryan. I started with one of the drawings of children I did the other day and made quite a realistic drawing of Ryan. I felt that I needed to make it simpler. so I condensed the character down making him shorter and tried to work from simple shapes. This did not work at all, the character went from looking confident and tall to short awkward. These are the drawings...

And so I have decided that before going any further I am going to look at  children's animated characters to get a general feel of the styles used and how I can possibly make my characters simple.