Targeting Style

Probably one of the most difficult parts of this process is settling on our desired style. Christina has so much talent and produces a variety of art styles with excellence. It can be a bit difficult to let go of the high detail world of photography and let her art become stylized. Let me catch you up on the design process first.

Christina starts with researching the era and the types of costumes that were typical for the characters in their region and context. This requires a lot of online time to chase down references and then sketch out what kind of design details belong in a gown, coat, hat, et cetera.

We then cast real life actors to physically represent each character. Every single character in the story is represented by an actor (even the cats). We will design the costumes their character appears in and ultimately pose and photograph them for physical reference.

Christina switches off her artist hat and throws on her costume hat as she translates the designs into fitted garments. The actors come in for a fitting and the costume is tailored to them, adjusted for comfort and elements are evaluated, enhanced or replaced until we are satisfied with the look.

I operate as the director of photography. We light, direct and photograph our actors as if they are in their actual scene. These photos helps to supply the artist with realistic fabric shape, bunching and folds. It gives a real life reference for proportions and (if I've lit them correctly) provides a reference for accurate lighting and shadows.

Why don't we just shoot the actors in the real scene? We could but it places a lot more demands on scheduling and time. Ultimately the artist will paint the scenes separately from the backgrounds anyway, so this method is the most flexible for our crew, artists and actors.

Back to my original dilemma. Christina is a fantastic artist with amazing skills in multiple art formats. She's done lots of traditional acrylic paintings and frankly I'm jealous of her 2D tooning skills. In our process she'll use the photographic reference and paint the artwork. In this project she will largely be using colored pencils and Copic markers. Her results are beautiful.

The challenge here is that we want to deliver a graphic novel art style. What we want is simplistic details and highly expressive faces in the language cues of a beautiful graphic novel. For this process we explore different art styles and dial back the details. To be honest this is one of the most difficult parts for me because I love resolution and I love Christina's traditional art. But we finally find our desired graphic novel art style and we are off to the races. Only six hundred or so more of these to design and paint!