OUR ILLUSTRATOR
So, wayyyyy back when, I (Holly) was attempting to learn to draw in order to illustrate the Sunnyville Buddies stories myself. I’m sure I could have done it, someday. You see, I was starting from the base skill of stick figures, so there was a long way to go. Over the year that I was practicing drawing, I improved a lot! But the reality is that I do have a day job, and I also realized, drawing is actually not a passion for me. But I do love writing our stories.
When we tested out a bunch of illustrators, Svitlana was hands down THE BEST one able to capture our scenes with her illustrative hand. Which made choosing an illustrator very easy! No one else even slightly compared to not only her drawing skills, but more importantly, her creative vision and ability to capture the ESSENCE of the scene and make it alive. She caught details no one else did. Ryan and I were so over the moon when we saw her first drawing, which happened to be this one:
She truly made our story come alive. I knew it would take me 10 years to be able to do that, and I wanted to publish our stories much sooner than that.
I did however progress my own drawing skills just far enough that I was able to come up with the look for most of our characters. Ryan drew the initial Elmer Cat! We’ll show you that in a minute. But first!
I’ll let Svitlana tell her story.
Back to me, Holly, & the Original Character Drawings
I drew the initial characters for Ava, Zander, Nutcracker, Sir Barbarosa, Redbeard, Jackie, Wayln, and Brownie. Ryan drew the original Elmer.
It all really started with Ava, and she came about completely by accident.
One day at work, which at the time was food photography, with my assistant Hannah, we sat out on the deck with a towering Oak tree over us, taking a much needed break in the shade of it’s foliage. I was showing Hannah how I was learning to draw, and what I’d learned about how to draw faces. While I was doing this, I ended up drawing a girl’s face. And it just happened to be the cutest girl’s face I’d ever drawn. I loved her! I felt so excited- this is AVA!
I’m very much a visual person. I often find that I move forward best on a project when I have something visually appealing to work with. Once I saw Ava in “real life”, no longer just an imaginary someone in the written stories, writing the stories became more prolific and just, well, better. The actual writing was better.
After feeling happy with how Ava came out, I decided to try to come up with the look of another character and since I’m such a newbie to drawing, I felt choosing the smallest character would be the least intimidating – afterall, Ava was just an accident to me! I wasn’t sure I could purposefully draw a character I loved.
Sir Barbarosa mouse’s personality had taken the most shape in the stories so far, and he was also one of the 2 smallest characters, so he was next. This took several tries, but this is the final Sir Barbarosa the Retired Pirate Mouse:
I was so encouraged that I was able to draw a cute mouse! From there, doing his cousin Redbeard seemed the next easiest thing to do since he was just another mouse. Here is Redbeard:
Next up I decided to tackle Zander bat. This seemed pretty challenging, which it was, because it took several tries for Zander to not look weird and scary. Have you ever noticed that bats are usually used for scary things, not cute things? I was determined to make a friendly non-scary looking bat. Here was the final Zander that I just loved:
Nutcracker was next. I have to be honest, he was the most difficult character to get together and it was because somehow most of what I kept finding myself drawing looked like Disney characters, which I didn’t want. But no matter what I would draw it just always came out looking like a Disney squirrel. Eventually I settled on this for Nutcracker but even still I feel like he’s a bit Disney-ish:
Jackie was next. Did you know that if you add freckles to a character, it immediately makes them look more friendly? I didn’t know that but I was finding out! Jackie took awhile to come up with too. Seeing a theme here? Every character too quite a few tries to go from strange/scary/odd looking to cute and friendly. Jackie is meant to be a Jackrabbit, rather than like a bunny rabbit, which was different. Ultimately, we kind of use creative license and made her look more like a regular bunny rabbit but we’re still calling her a Jackrabbit. It’s our story and we can do what we want!
I took a pretty long break after that and wasn’t drawing for awhile. Once we had one of our stories almost complete, and started thinking about illustration for the book, we realized we needed to get the look for the other characters together.
Ryan came up with Elmer Cat while he was drawing in his journal. he was trying to draw our cat, also named Elmer, and he showed it to me. I was like, “wow! we could use that in our stories!”
Brownie Bear was a challenge. I didn’t like anything I drew. Finally I realized it was the eyes. Drawing his eyes the same way I was drawing the other characters I just didn’t like. Once I made his eyes much smaller and just mostly black button looking things, I felt happy with him:
Here is Wayln:
And then for our very first book we were going to publish, a new little character had come about that wasn’t part of the original Sunnyville Buddies. That was Pesky Wesky, Elmer Cat’s little nephew kitten. He’s basically a stinker, which if you’ve read the book you know, and thus his tongue is sticking out:
Those are all the characters we drew originally ourselves. By the time we got to the rest, we had found the amazing real illustrator Svitlana and we gave her various reference photos to come up with the other characters – Matt & Molly, Baby Tai, and Leroy.